[pol] Bad news for Bush..undecided voters are really for Kerry

Troke

On TB every waking moment
http://www.tnr.com/blog/campaignjournal

UNDECIDED VOTERS VS. APPROVAL-GAP VOTERS: Tony Fabrizio of the Republican polling firm Fabrizio McLaughlin & Associates has released two polling memos recently with in-depth analysis of two interesting and important voting groups.

Last week he took a close look at undecided voters in 19 battleground states. The memo (PDF) on this poll is eye-opening. Politics 101 teaches us that undecided voters almost always break for the challenger as the election approaches. If these voters haven't decided to support the guy they know best, the theory goes, there must be a reason they are holding out and will therefore end up supporting the challenger if he or she is an acceptable alternative.

Confirming this theory, Fabrizio found that undecided voters in 2004 are overwhelmingly anti-Bush and pro-Kerry. By almost every criteria they look like Kerry voters, according to the memo:


They are more than twice as likely to see things headed down the wrong track as compared to voters overall. ... They give President Bush a net NEGATIVE image rating. ... They give President Bush a net NEGATIVE job approval rating. ... A solid majority sees the Country as being WORSE OFF than they were 4 years ago. ... They are significantly more pessimistic about the current state of the nation's economy. ... They are significantly more pessimistic about their own current financial condition. ... They are twice as likely to see the number of jobs in their area as DECREASING instead of increasing. ... They are significantly more likely to favor the federal government doing more as opposed to doing less. ... They are more likely to be pro-choice on the issue of abortion. ... They are more likely to have seen or heard advertising critical of President Bush than John Kerry in the past year. ... John Kerry holds a slight net POSITIVE image rating [among the undecided voters].

As the memo notes, "Clearly, if these undecided voters were leaning any harder against the door of the Kerry camp, they would crash right through it."

In a memo released today but not yet posted on the Web, Fabrizio looked at a polling quirk I've been wondering about for a long time. Why is it that in many polls, Bush's job approval rating is higher than the percentage who say they will vote for him? Fabrizio calls this difference the "approval gap." In his 19-state poll the percentage of people who approve of the job Bush is doing but say they will vote for Kerry is 8.6 percent.

Approval-gap voters seem to be the great anomaly of American politics. Kerry voters tend to intensely dislike Bush, and Bush voters seem to intensely dislike Kerry. Undecided voters often get tagged as wishy-washy, but secretly they seem to be just as polarized as everyone else about Bush and Kerry. Approval-gap voters, by contrast, are the true equivocators. They are both pro-Bush and pro-Kerry. They just happen to be a little more pro-Kerry. They have a net favorable opinion of Bush (48 percent favorable to 30 percent unfavorable), but an even higher net favorable opinion of Kerry (54 percent favorable to 15 percent unfavorable).

Based on the analysis of these two groups, Fabrizio's counter-intuitive advice to the Bush team is to forget about the undecided voters--who are really just future Kerry supporters--and to concetrate on the approval-gap voters, many of whom say they are voting for Kerry but are actually still open to Bush. "Focusing on 'approval gap' voters versus undecided voters," he argues, "will yield a better return on investment" because "'approval gap' voters aren't predisposed against the President personally"--as the undecided voters are--and they "are less pessimistic about the direction of the country."

Fabrizio thinks the key for Bush is to increase his approval rating by emphasizing positive economic news while pounding away at Kerry with negative ads, and that seems to be exactly what Bush has been doing lately. The problem with this strategy is that it's contradictory. Every effort to tear Kerry down comes at the expense of the effort to project a campaign of sunshine and optimism on the issues. Besides, if neither the undecided voters or the approval-gap voters were swayed by the biggest TV ad camaign in political history, is there any reason to believe they'll be persuaded by a second wave?
 
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