Sunday, 15 August 2004

The bounce that stayed. The pundits sniffed at the four-point "bounce" that John Kerry received from the Democratic National Convention — previous candidates had climbed in the polls, at least temporarily, by as much as 16 points. But in the weeks since he accepted the nomination, something unusual has happened with Kerry: His "bounce" never came back down again.

Kerry is now leading by as much as seven points in Florida polling, and is up by three points in Ohio — both of which are must-win states for the Bush campaign. In Pennsylvania, which was expected to be a battleground state, Kerry is up by eight points; in New Hampshire, a state Bush carried in 2000, Kerry has a seven-point lead.

Bush's support is eroding across the near South, with Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina all wavering (say it with me: "Vice President John Edwards"). In the West, Nevada and Arizona (both Bush states in 2000) are on the bubble; in the Midwest Missouri is a statistical tie. Bush still has the support of his base in the Deep South and the Rocky Mountains — but Kerry's numbers are slowly trending upward, week after week, and the GOP's desperately negative campaigning does not appear to be swaying voters.

This year's election is far from over — one pollster says if the election were held today, Kerry would win 228 electoral votes, Bush 197, and the other 113 are too close to call — but as Kerry's "bounce" becomes a sustained climb, Bush is running out of time to turn his campaign around. Eleven weeks from now, America goes to the polls; eleven weeks after that, if the current trends continue, John Kerry goes to the White House.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:15 am. comments.