Naysayers: Voter dissatisfaction indicates it won't be close [View All]

[Lorien]

Voter dissatisfaction indicates it won't be close
Byron Williams - byronspeaks.com
10.15.04 - Conventional wisdom suggests this year's presidential election will be close. Practically every poll taken has the race within the margin of error.
At the risk of looking like a fool, I am prepared to respectfully disagree with conventional wisdom to offer the following contrarian perspective: The election will not be close.
Before you sit down to your computer to begin your "Williams, have you lost your mind?" rant, hear me out. I have reached this conclusion for two reasons. My first reason is shaped by what polls cannot see.
When I was in Philadelphia last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story in the local section that addressed increased voter registration. The final day of registration in Pennsylvania and New Jersey last week brought huge crowds to registration offices. As of September, Philadelphia had received 219,000 applications from either new voters or those who had moved or had been stricken from the rolls. With some 60,000 applications arriving on the final day, it is possible the city's volume this year could break the record of 293,000 applications set in the tension-filled mayoral race of 1983 between Wilson Goode and Frank Rizzo.
This trend of increased voter registration is replicated, in particular, in a majority of the battleground states.
According to the New York Times, voter registration campaigns in heavily Democratic areas have added tens of thousands of new voters to the rolls in the swing states of Ohio and Florida, a surge that far exceeds the efforts of Republicans in both states

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