RALEIGH – The publicly released polls haven’t been looking too good for Democrat Erskine Bowles in his bid to defeat Republican Elizabeth Dole in the U.S. Senate race. Now the news has gotten a lot worse with the release of the first of three scheduled tracking polls from prominent pollster John Zogby.
His record in predicting the outcome of presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections has been unparalleled in recent years. Zogby says the key to his methodology is a proprietary formula that serves to predict the turnout of Democrats, Republicans, and independents more accurately than do unweighted responses from “likely” voters.
As a result of his success during the 1990s, he’s in high demand. For the2002 election cycle, Zogby is conducting surveys in 10 states in gubernatorial and Senate contests. MSNBC is his partner for all the polls, though in Missouri and Arkansas he has local media clients, as well.
Sorry for burying the lead. Zogby’s first poll in the North Carolina Senate race, conducted on September 17 and 18, has Dole leading Bowles by a whopping 55 percent to 32 percent margin, with Libertarian Sean Haugh at 1 percent and 11 percent undecided. Before you discount this poll, remember that Zogby is a liberal Democrat who calls it like he sees it, and that in virtually all of his other targeted races he has the candidates running much closer together, such as nail-biters in Colorado, Arkansas, Minnesota, New Jersey, and South Dakota.
Other polls had pegged the gap at around 11 or 12 points. If Zogby’s snapshot is an accurate one, Bowles simply does not have enough time to make up the difference. He would have to win all the undecided vote and woo or suppress the turnout of current Dole voters. No way do you do that by running on the minimum wage – that’s so 1980s – and scaring old folks about Social Security.
Unless some very scary skeletons come out of Dole’s closet by Halloween, she and the national GOP will be having Thanksgiving early.