Poll Positions

If you listen to the evening news, or read your local paper, you get the impression that the 2004 Presidential race is statistically a dead heat. About 51 percent of people polled say they’ll vote for Kerry, and about 49 percent for Bush — with the margin of error, that’s equal.

But that’s not a good indicator at all. We don’t have a straight majority-vote system here, as we saw in 1912 (where Woodrow Wilson got the Electoral College majority with only 42 percent of the popular vote) and again in 2000.

So a nationwide poll showing Bush or Kerry in the lead is meaningless.

Instead, we need to look at the state-by-state polls, and figure out how many electoral votes each candidate is winning.

In other words, Bush has a huge lead in Alabama and Alabama has 9 electoral votes. Kerry has a huge lead in California, and California has 55 votes.

Continue down the line and you find that, as of today, Kerry has a significant lead (i.e., more than just a few points) in states with a total of 229 electoral votes. Bush has a significant lead in states with 186 votes. (270 are needed to win the election).

That’s a heck of a lot different than “the candidates are in a dead heat.”

Two sites worth checking out for polling data are The Electoral Vote Predictor, which looks at the state-by-state numbers to designate each as “Strong,” “Weak,” or “Barely” for Bush or Kerry (it currently predicts Kerry getting 291 electoral votes to Bush’s 237); and RealClearPolitics, which shows the latest numbers from lots of polling companies.