Rational Action

This summer I fought in a vicious argument over who would win on November 2. The polls at the time were more or less tied. I predicted that Bush would build a lead over the coming months and ultimately win the election. I reasoned that anyone who bought into Kerry’s foreign policy charges or his cries of economic mismanagement was already voting Blue. With the so-called “transfer of sovereignty” finished, Iraq would fall off the front page of newspapers. Kerry would continue to criticize the administration’s handling of the war, but with public’s perceiving that Iraq was stabilizing, that critique would fall on deaf ears. Likewise, the “jobless recovery” finally seemed to have lost its derogatory adjective: there had been several months of robust payroll employment growth, and with Greenspan indicating he wanted to hike rates, even the experts were claiming that the trend would continue.

As the RNC came to a close, I saw my prediction slowly coming true. The Republicans were running away with the media coverage, making Iraq seem like a another successful Democratic experiment. Payroll employment was up 144,000 in August (from the report released September 3), not enough to increase participation rate, but a sizeable number nevertheless. Media coverage made it seem like a major accomplishment in the recovery.

Then a few unanticipated things happened.

First, Iraq never really faded from the headlines. It returned after the RNC, and the images conflicted with the Republicans’ rosy picture. The 1000th American soldier was killed on September 7, and criticism of the war from within the President’s own party indicated that the security situation was detiorating. It did not help that several major urban areas of Iraq weren’t even under coalition control, shattering the administration’s claims that order had been restored.

The economic news was of no help to Bush, either. When the Current Employment Survey results were released on October 3, payroll employment did not even climb by 100,000 — economists had been expecting gains of roughly 150,000. (For those who think 100,000 jobs is plenty to add in a month, remember that in order to keep (Employment)/(Labor Force) constant, the economy needs to add 150,000 jobs every month.) While this news wasn’t nearly as high-profile as the security situation in Iraq, it left the Bush team with no new information to cheer about, and it allowed Kerry to continue claming that the current administration was the first since Hoover to lose jobs.

These developments in current events occurred along with another factor that I had either not considered or completely discounted in my summer argument: the debates. If you had asked me in August, I probably would have predicted that Bush would blow Kerry out of the water in ability to convince swing voters. In fact, I felt that Bush thoroughly beat Kerry on style in at least the first two debates (I mainly listened to the final debate, and felt like Kerry sounded much better than Bush). However, polls from the first and third debate showed swing voters heavily favoring Kerry, and most polls even gave Kerry a slight lead in the second debate.

As it stands, the numbers have converged and the election is in a virtual tie. Most national polls have Bush up by only a few points, but they said the same thing in 2000, and Gore won the popular vote. The electoral college is a complete tossup. Kerry has hung in there, and time has proven my summer claims incorrect.

Is there a moral to the story?

I’m not sure. For one: please, please, don’t trust my predictions. The truth is that the ups and downs of this election have depended less on the candidates and more on the weather. While Kerry’s debate performance was admirable, he couldn’t have done it without the current events ammunition that was seemingly handed to him by God. Fate has given Kerry good hand after good hand, now let’s see if he can beat my prediction once and for all on November 2.

(P.S. About the current events ammunition: I still haven’t figured out where goose hunting comes into play here.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2004 at 2:11 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.