September 15, 2004

AN IL WIND:

Kerry Losing Lead Over Bush In Illinois (CBS 2 Chicago, Sep 15, 2004)

The presidential election is just 48 days away now, and according to an exclusive new poll of Illinois voters, George W. Bush and John Kerry could be in a virtual dead heat.

The turn in this election tide could set up a political stunner. Illinois is a Democratic powerhouse in national elections, and John Kerry does maintain a small lead in our exclusive CBS 2 poll, but President Bush appears to be gaining support among voters.

Illinois no longer looks like a sure thing for Democrat John Kerry. His once 13 percentage point lead is now down to four points. That's exactly our survey's margin of accuracy, meaning the contest could be a dead-heat.


And Mr. Kerry has nothing like the homestate loyalty that got Walter Mondale a state.


MORE:
USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll Shows Bush and Kerry in Dead Heat in Minnesota (PRNewswire, September 15, 2004)

USA TODAY/CNN/GALLUP have released the results of a poll of likely voters in the battleground state of Minnesota. The results show that of likely voters in that state, George W. Bush and John Kerry each have 45% of the vote, with Ralph Nader receiving 5% of the vote.

The poll of 675 likely voters, conducted September 11 - 14, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 15, 2004 8:03 PM
Comments

W might have a chance here. The Dem vote all rides on the Chicago machine and I don't get the sense that they're really into this one. If they let the thing go straight as in 1984 and 1972 it's not out of the realm of possilbility.

Posted by: Jeff at September 15, 2004 9:13 PM

I'm assuming, this being CBS, that this is a bad poll, though no doubt IL had the potential to tighten. If Kerry is this close here, a whole nother layer of states come into play.

Posted by: JAB at September 15, 2004 10:15 PM

Agree with JAB - I remember polls a month or so ago showing Kerry +18 in IL. If this state is in play then Kerry is really really in trouble. As for MN I would have thought Bush would be pulling away by now since it was close a month or so ago before Kerry began his free fall.

Posted by: AWW at September 15, 2004 10:57 PM

You've got to think that if Ditka were running Bush would be awfully likely to win IL...

Posted by: brian at September 15, 2004 11:28 PM

Although we have the same problem we've had for a while. If Bush is comfortably ahead in all the red states, tied or slightly in the lead in all the toss-up states, and doing surprisingly well in the blue states, how is Kerry so close in the national polls? Clearly, a lot of data massaging is going on. The DU-ers are convinced that there is a hidden reserve of Bush haters who are afraid to confess that they will vote for Kerry. I'm starting to believe that in the last three years, a good number of people have begun to consider themselves Republican, and are thus being lost when the pollsters reduce the Republican vote for supposed oversampling. But either way, an awful lot of people are going to be surprised on 11/3.

Posted by: David Cohen at September 16, 2004 12:16 AM

David: If you're right, and Bush does significantly better than polling indicates, care to guess what Michael Moore and his fellow Dems will have to say about it? They've been setting up to cry fraud in FL for months now...

Posted by: brian at September 16, 2004 5:07 AM

OK, Mister fifty to nothing, are you ready to call Massachusetts now?

Posted by: Fred Jacobsen (San Fran) at September 16, 2004 5:34 AM

Gets even worse--new poll puts W ahead in New Jersey.

Posted by: AC at September 16, 2004 7:56 AM

Fred:

I'm leaning towards moving DC into the Bush column....

Posted by: oj at September 16, 2004 10:59 AM

If Kerry keeps dropping, no national reporter will want to interview him - which means he will have completed the last 3+ months of the campaign without a single press conference. Years from now, people will shake their heads at this race and this man. And worse (for Kerry), the beatings from the past will probably continue as the Democrats split again over Vietnam.

Posted by: jim hamlen at September 16, 2004 11:07 AM

I wonder if this shift is partly related to Keyes. Now, obviously he's not going to convince anyone to vote for himself over Obama. He's been painted (legitimately) as something of a whackjob. But he's very persuasive--so he may well convince people to vote for Bush over Kerry.

Posted by: Timothy at September 16, 2004 2:48 PM
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