Where The Race Stands Now

At electoral-vote.com (still no bleeping perma-links), the scorecard is Bush 307, Kerry 211, which is somewhat grim-looking, and includes tiny Bush leads in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Iowa, and a within the MOE lead in Wisconsin. If Kerry picks up those former Gore states, as I'm just about willing to bet he will (any takers?), the the scorecard would stand at Kerry 264, Bush 254. Furthermore, Ohio is now precisely even, 47% a piece, and Bush is finished if he can't carry it.

Today's report from the votemaster includes this fascinating nugget:

Jimmy Breslin of Newsday had an column yesterday that, if true, makes this website irrelevant. Breslin claims that pollsters do not call the 168 million cell phones in the country. Since many younger voters do not have a land line and just a cell phone, they will be hugely underrepresented in all the telephone polls. Since younger voters lean more towards the Democrats than the average voter, the polls may be greatly underestimating Kerry's strength. Between missing all the people who have only a cell phone and no land line and the 5 million overseas voters, the polls maybe missing a very large section of the electorate.

This is, of course, one particular version of the Kerry landslide scenario, in which Kerry has been holding a massive lead occluded by gross underestimation of voter turnout in polls as well as flawed likely voter models that don't account for the present level of anti-Bush feeling. [Keep in mind that every single likely voter model is fatally flawed before it even gets off the ground; c.f. Hume's problem of induction, which the whole (more or less) of 20th century philosophy of science failed to resolve--ed.]

On the national level, the picture improves considerably. According to the latest ARG poll, Kerry has a MOE lead over Bush among RVs nationally with or without Nader in the race, and is exactly knotted, 47-47-3, among LVs. The latest Harris poll has Kerry ahead by 1, while the latest Pew poll puts Bush ahead by 1. And via EDM, Bush leads Kerry by only 1 among LVs in the latest GQR Research poll.

So um, nothing is decided. At all. It beats me what's going on with the Gallup poll that has Bush ahead by 13. But as Steve M. (of No More Mister Nice Blog) points out, Gallup had Bush ahead by 13 a week before the 2000 election. Er, yeah.