Flashback - Presidential Polls May, 2004: “No Way Republicans Can Hold White House”
You probably don’t remember John Kerry’s 76 electoral-vote trouncing of George W. Bush in 2004. That’s because it didn’t happen.
But a rout of that magnitude is exactly what state-by-state polls were predicting at the end of May four years ago, as reported by electoral-vote.com. Through the magic of the Wayback Machine, you can see that those polls showed Kerry on track to beat Bush 307 electoral votes to 231, including projected victories in Iowa, New Mexico, West Virginia, Florida and Nevada. Kerry lost all those states in November, and he lost the election, too.
The 2004 projections are worth revisiting today because Hillary Clinton is putting similar numbers at the center of her argument to superdelegates that she is better positioned to win the White House this year than rival Barack Obama - and thus should be the Democratic nominee.
“Nearly all independent analyses show that I am in a stronger position to win the Electoral College,” Clinton wrote to superdelegates in a letter this week.
Here’s the crux of that argument: According to electoral-vote.com’s polling data this week, Clinton appears on track to beat Republican John McCain 327 to 194 in November (with 17 electoral votes deadlocked at the moment). Obama, by comparison, leads 266 to 248, with 24 votes deadlocked.
So… what if anything do those numbers mean? Are they more accurate predictors than their May 2004 counterparts? Or, if they’re similarly flawed, do they still reveal a general-election strength for Clinton when compared to Obama?
More questions for superdelegates to ponder - and the rest of us to argue over.
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