"It's tempting for conservatives to believe several major polls showing President George W. Bush four to six points ahead of Kerry right now. Tempting, but probably a mistake. A new tracking poll released by John Zogby on Thursday -- and taken in the wake of the president's disappointing performance in the first debate -- finds a statistical dead heat, with Bush at 46 percent, Senator Kerry at 44 percent, and 8 percent undecided. ... by far the most interesting -- and disturbing -- finding in his poll is that 'among undecided voters, only 15% feel the President deserves to be re-elected, while 39% say it is time for someone new.' What if the undecideds break 2-to-1 against the president less than 30 days from now? We could be looking at a Kerry landslide."
Read Joel C. Rosenberg's National Review piece
The Republicans seem to be surprised by this. They shouldn't be.
John Kerry has been campaigning for the presidency for a year and a half, and for only about six months as the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party.
George W. Bush, however, has been campaigning for the presidency since at least 1998, and for nearly four years as the incumbent.
Hint: When you've been campaigning for nearly six years, and when you've been able to do so for nearly four years from a platform of 100% media penetration and with the ability to actually do, rather than just promise ...
"Undecided" means "not very happy with the way things are."
The only undecided voters who might go for Bush are disaffected Republicans who are very unhappy with him, but not quite unhappy enough with him to have already firmly committed to a third party candidate or perhaps even to Kerry.
All of those undecided voters are default non-Bush voters unless Bush suddenly comes up with a reason for them to support him -- something he hasn't been able to do in the last six years, and something that he's unlikely to do in the next three weeks.
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