About the debates, I heard that since the first debate gets 10 million more viewers, Bush's team demanded that it be about foreign policy, which they thought would be Bush's strongest area. Well, they screwed the pooch on that one. Now with debate two in a town hall forum where questions cannot be controlled (likely to cause more scowling by Bush, a very un-presidential feature), and debate three about domestic issues like negative job growth and poverty, Bush is on the defensive.

Anyway, the polls must be scaring the Bush team. Historically, polls have shown that incumbents usually get very few undecideds. There have been four incumbent presidential elections in the past 25 years. If we take an average of the final surveys conducted by the three major networks and their partners, in three of these the incumbent fell short of or merely matched his final poll number, while exceeding it only once, and then by just a single point (Ronald Reagan). On average, the incumbent comes in half a point below his final poll result.

Year Incumbent Final Polls (in percent) Actual Vote (in percent)
1996 Bill Clinton 51 49
1992 George Bush Senior 37 37
1984 Ronald Reagan 58 59
1980 Jimmy Carter 42 41

The numbers for challengers usually go up. In every case, the challenger, including Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, exceeds the final poll result by at least 2 points, and the average gain is 4 points. In 1980, Ronald Reagan received 51 percent, fully 6 percentage points above his final poll results.

Apparently, this happens because elections are fundamentally a referendum on the incumbent. The first step in voters' decision-making process is to answer the question "does Bush deserve re-election?" Undecided voters have basically already answered that question in the negative, and their undecided status reflects the fact that they don't know enough about the challenger (yet) to feel comfortable stating a public preference.

No one ever talks about this, but the Bush team knows it.

Finally, with new voter registrations at an all time high and leaning heavily toward Democratic party membership, Bush has quite a few worries. He's already changed the tone of his campaign to compensate for losing the first debate. And yeah, Karl Rove must be staying up nights thinking up new dirty tricks to play. Unfortunately, the last one - the global test misrepresentation - was dismissed by Kerry as "pathetic" which seems to have worked.

This election is really quite entertaining, isn't it?