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News On The Issues
OnTheIssues.org & Speakout.com
Nov. 1, 2004 Vol. 2, No. 7
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1. Voter information for your state
2. Our presidential election prediction
3. What happens to the website after the election?
Speakout's mission is to provide non-partisan information for voters in the Presidential and Congressional elections, so that your vote can be based on issues rather than on personalities and popularity.
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1. Voter information
for your state
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We now have posted voting information for every locality in the country -- click on your state at
http://activote.speakout.com -- that shows the rules of voter registration and the state election office for every state. Then scroll down to see a list of every local election office, by town or county, with phone numbers appropriate to call on Election Day.
We provide this information in conjunction with our partner website, www.ActivoteAmerica.com . If you're still undecided about who to vote for, that website provides a summary version of our issue coverage, at
http://activote.ontheissues.org . And of course we recommend our VoteMatch quiz at
http://www.speakout.com/VoteMatch for inspecting how your candidates' issue stances match up with your own beliefs.
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2. Our presidential
election prediction
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OnTheIssues predicts that Bush will win the popular vote. But Kerry will win the electoral race by several dozen electoral votes. We base our election prediction on the results of the 1998 gubernatorial election in Minnesota, where Jesse Ventura was polling down three points the weekend before the election, yet won the election by three points. A spread of six points is greater than the margin of error in any serious poll, and understanding why Ventura won -- and why the polls were wrong -- is the basis of our presidential prediction.
Pollsters don't actually report the number of people who say they're going to vote for Bush or Kerry. The pollsters adjust the raw numbers by factors that account for historical demographic trends. For example, if only 25% of people aged 18-25 voted in the previous election, then anyone in that demographic group is discounted by 75% in polls in the current election. That's called 'normalization' by the pollsters, and is built into every scientific poll. The question for the presidential race is: 'Which states have factors that would make the pollsters wrong?'.
The reason that Jesse Ventura beat the pollster results is because young people came out to vote more than they did in previous elections. That's not surprising, because the turnout among 18-25 year-olds is historically very low, and Ventura was very popular among that group. Ventura had to his advantage 'same-day voter registration' in Minnesota, which enticed many young people to register and vote that day. This year, Kerry has to his advantage several large-scale voter registration efforts focused on young people. Hence we predict that the 18-25 demographic will turn out to vote more than in the 2000 election, and that the pollsters are not picking that up.
The second half of the equation is whether newly-registered young voters will vote for Kerry. That is the historical trend -- that young people vote more Democratic and more against the incumbent. Hence Edwards said today, 'If you see young people lined up to vote, we're gonna win,' and we agree that that's likely to happen. If young people vote disproportionately for Bush, then our prediction will be proven wrong.
The other low-voting group which we predict will turn out in greater-than-expected numbers are black males. That's one of the lowest-voting demographics in the country, but this year we predict a change. Black males were the focus of the 2000 Florida problems, and felt particularly disenfranchised by the results there. As with young people, there have been several large-scale organized efforts to increase registration and turnout among black males. That demographic votes even more Democratic than young people -- often up to 90%-10% Democrat vs. Republican -- which can mean huge numbers in Florida, Ohio, and any place with large black populations.
Republicans have organized numerous large-scale registration and get-out-the-vote efforts as well. Their focus have been in corporate workplaces and especially in churches, and via anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives in 11 states. It is possible that those efforts will overrule the polling results -- especially in the 11 states with the ballot initiatives -- on the same grounds as above. But the Republican-targeted groups vote in much higher numbers than the Democrat-targeted groups, and hence there is less room for improvement. And it's the room-for-improvement that the polling numbers do not pick up. The ballot initiatives may cause Bush to score an upset over the pollsters' Kerry-ahead predictions in Michigan and Oregon -- and give us confidence in predicting a Bush victory in Ohio and Arkansas despite tight races there.
There's one more factor to consider. Many people don't like to tell pollsters who they will vote for, which the pollsters report as 'undecided'. Those people often don't like incumbents, for the same reasons as they won't tell pollsters their preference. What we see as healthy American iconoclasm means any incumbent has to have a strong lead among voters who call themselves undecided, because those voters tend to vote for the challenger. That factor could amount to another percentage point or two, since the 'undecided vote' is running at 3-4 points this weekend. Typical analyses give the undecided vote to Kerry by a factor of two-to-one, which means another net gain for Kerry of a couple of percentage points over what the pollsters show.
Now onto the specific numbers. OnTheIssues uses electoral-vote.com as our source of polling information, which you can see at
http://www.ontheissues.org/elect_frm.htm . If Bush or Kerry is ahead by more than 3 points -- strong support -- that state is very likely going to go for that candidate. Based on the analysis above, we predict that Kerry will win states in which neither candidate is three points ahead, with some exceptions below. The contentious states (with electoral vote count shown) that we predict will go to Kerry are:
- VA (13) - Bush up by 3 points.
- HI (4) - Bush up by 1 point.
- NM (5) - tied in the polls.
- NH (4) - tied in the polls.
- NV (5) - tied in the polls.
- MI (17) - Kerry up by 1 point.
- IA (7) - Kerry up by 1 point.
- FL (27) - Kerry up by 1-2 points.
- PA (21) - Kerry up by 3 points.
- MN (10) - Kerry up by 3 points.
All the pundits have been predicting Ohio as the Florida of 2004 (i.e., the most contentious state). Bush is currently up by 4-5 points in Ohio. With that size lead, we predict Bush will win Ohio despite the factors in the above analysis. The overall count is:
- 196 electoral votes in strong pro-Kerry states
- 229 electoral votes in strong pro-Bush states
- 113 electoral votes in the states listed above, which we predict go to Kerry, 79-34.
The sum of the above is that Kerry wins the electoral vote 275-263. We predict that Virginia and Hawaii will both be tighter than shown above but will both go to Bush. Hawaii would go to Kerry based on our analysis, but Cheney spent the weekend there which we predict will be decisive. The surge based on gay-marriage ballot initiatives will give Bush a win in Michigan, we predict. The next most likely state where Bush would benefit from the gay-marriage surge is Oregon, but Kerry is ahead by 6 points. If you see Oregon going for Bush on Tuesday evening, Bush will certainly win a landslide -- adding Oregon to our numbers above gives Bush a 270-268 victory but winning Oregon would imply other unexpected victories.
We also predict that Bush will win the popular vote. Bush is behind in 5 large-population states: CA, NY, IL, PA, and FL. Of course he will still get around 40%-45% of the vote in each of those states, millions of votes which will count for zero electoral votes. We hope for a electoral-vote-popular-vote split again because voters will be so dismayed at the system that we will do away with the electoral college, which we view as a step forward for democracy. In fact, Colorado may split their 9 electoral votes this year, by a ballot initiative on just that topic. We endorse seeing the electoral college done away with -- if several large states adopted Colorado's system (or the existing split-vote systems of Nebraska and Maine) then the electoral college would effectively be gone -- and good riddance!
We are not endorsing Kerry -- we don't endorse candidates but we do endorse political participation and we especially endorse voting based on the issues. We note for the record that in 2000 we similarly predicted a Bush popular vote victory and a Gore electoral vote victory and we were incorrect on both counts (although few pundits predicted a split, and we did). If we're as wrong in 2004 as we were in 2000, we'll be the first to tell our viewers 'ignore the polls and the pundits' because we already encourage that. And viewers should note that this prediction is based on very wonkish concepts -- we wholeheartedly admit to being wonks!
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3. What happens to the website
after the election?
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We will be around after the election. Our immediate post-election tasks are:
- Add newly-elected House members to our database.
- Remake the newly-elected 109th Congress page for the Senate winners.
- Add newly-elected governors to our database.
We do not intend to have any down-time post-election at all. For our long-term viewers, you might recall that we did have some down-time early in 2001, and the Speakout Forum was closed throughout 2002 into 2003. That was due to our necessary post-dot-com-bust restructuring and will not happen in this election cycle.
We will be seeking grants to cover our expenses for detailed coverage of the 2005 gubernatorial elections and the 2006 congressional elections. We will do so if grant money is forthcoming -- advertising revenue is only sufficient to cover expenses during presidential elections. If not, we will continue covering incumbent voting records in any case.
We are extending coverage to state legislatures as well. Our first attempt is in Massachusetts, our home base, which you can preview at
http://www.MassScorecard.org. That website simply lists voting records of all incumbent legislators, but has been remarkably controversial. Check out the next newsletter for details....
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OnTheIssues.org is a volunteer organization dedicated to presenting issue-based information about candidates for national office.
OnTheIssues is a project of the Speakout Foundation, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation registered in Maryland. Contributions are fully tax-deductible. The Speakout Foundation is the non-profit successor to the Speakout Corporation, which owned and operated the 1999-2000 websites Speakout.com and Issues2000.org.
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www.OnTheIssues.org
On The Issues and
the Speakout Foundation
Contact: Jesse Gordon
Jesse@OnTheIssues.org
617-320-6989
1770 Mass Ave #630
Cambridge MA 02140
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