By the way, one thing I said in the above essay-- that Bush's drop in popularity has stabilized-- may still be inaccurate. His job approval ratings have all been almost flat at 50-something percent for a couple of months, but his job disapproval ratings are still measurably rising; the people in the "not sure" category are mostly going negative, and dissatisfaction on various specific issues is rising. It's nothing that would make winning easy for an opponent, but it points to opportunities.
The latest polls also bear out that there's no basis for calling any of the top four or so Democrats particularly unelectable. (There are wild differences between polls in the Bush-versus-Democrat elect numbers, larger than the sample-size-based "margin of error", but they seem to be systematics; within each poll you can compare apples to apples with some consistency.) The major basis for the belief in Dean'scomparative unelectability at this point seems to be smack talk from Republicans about how giddy they are at the prospect of a Dean nomination and the 49-state landslide they'll get. They're probably at least partly sincere, but it sounds like warmed-over wartime rhetoric from April; I don't see the reason to believe that they know things the polls don't, unless they broke into Dean's sealed files and discovered he eats kittens or something.
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Date: 2003-12-12 03:10 am (UTC)The latest polls also bear out that there's no basis for calling any of the top four or so Democrats particularly unelectable. (There are wild differences between polls in the Bush-versus-Democrat elect numbers, larger than the sample-size-based "margin of error", but they seem to be systematics; within each poll you can compare apples to apples with some consistency.) The major basis for the belief in Dean'scomparative unelectability at this point seems to be smack talk from Republicans about how giddy they are at the prospect of a Dean nomination and the 49-state landslide they'll get. They're probably at least partly sincere, but it sounds like warmed-over wartime rhetoric from April; I don't see the reason to believe that they know things the polls don't, unless they broke into Dean's sealed files and discovered he eats kittens or something.