Political Parties and Partisanship: A Look at the American Electorate

Transcript

THOMAS E. MANN: Now, you might have noticed that Washington tends to react excessively to each new poll or candidate miscue. The discussion of the American elections often times dwells on inside baseball and swings widely in response to new bits of information. We have just gone through one of those cycles, starting with the Republican Convention. A few early media polls shaped the coverage and led to an outpouring of advice from Democrats outside the campaign as to what the Kerry campaign needed to do to resurrect a candidacy on its deathbed.

Today's Washington Post found it newsworthy to put on page one a gossipy story about who is up and who is down in the campaign itself, while the story on Kerry's speech to the National Guard, the sharpest and most coherent statement in a two-month period lacking in coherent statements on Iraq, managed A20. Let the record show that John Harwood's Wall Street Journal had that as its lead item on page one.

Now, we had a series of four or, I think, five national polls that basically show the race returning to a dead heat, a plus or minus one percent lead, depending on whether one is looking at registered or likely voters. Therefore, I was getting ready to be treated to insightful analyses of how Kerry had turned around his campaign in the past week, but, alas, Gallup released a poll late yesterday showing a 14-point Bush lead in the field at the same time as Andy Kohut's Pew study. Andy, the former president of Gallup, used Princeton Survey Research. He found that the first three days in the field showed that large Bush lead and the next three days showed the race at parity.

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