Nothing But Words

Barring an “October Surprise,” a major Kerry mistake in the debates, or massive electoral fraud, Kerry will win. You heard it here first . Not long after the DNC, Kerry lost his bounce in the polls, and now Bush is losing his post-RNC bounce (most of the current polls have the race back to a dead heat). So how can I call it for Kerry? I don’t have secret polling data of my own, but I have three hunches about what the polls are overlooking:

1. All the polls emphasize the results among “likely voters.” These are voters “who say they are very likely to vote in November, have a high level of interest in the presidential election and have voted in every or nearly every presidential election [empahsis added].” The intensity of this election cycle has pushed new voter registration up higher than usual. And, more often than not, the previously unregistered have Democratic leanings. Kerry consistently scores a couple points higher in the poll results that include registered voters, and not just “likely” voters (for example).
2. Most modern polls are phone based, and they only call those with land lines. They don’t call any of the 169 million cell phones in the United States. As Jimmy Breslin argues, young people are more likely to have cell phones than older people, and they’re the most likely group to have a cell phone but not a land line. And folks age 18-29 prefer Kerry to Bush almost 2:1 (see here). With a war on and talk of a military draft in the air, I think young people might turn out in higher numbers than usual as well. There are no numbers on this, but I’d be willing to bet that Breslin is right: there’s a population of several million in this group who aren’t being sampled at all in the polls.
3. There are 7 million Americans living abroad, who are also not included in any of the phone polls. With the intensity of this campaign, I think more expats than usual will vote this time. Extrapolating from a survey that indicates Kerry has an almost 2:1 lead among those who hold passports, I’d argue that the same holds true for US expats.