Michael Barone develops a thesis I first floated three years ago. Is W a re-run of JFK? Money graf:
Kennedy in 1962 and Mr. Bush in 2002 marginally increased their parties’ share of the vote–very much against precedent–and greatly strengthened their parties’ leverage in a closely divided Congress. Within two years, Kennedy’s Democrats won by huge majorities, often wrongly attributed to Lyndon Johnson’s appeal to voters who would never have voted for Kennedy Democrats. But if you look at the regional breakdowns in the September and October 1963 Gallup polls, taken just before Kennedy was assassinated, it is clear that he was heading to a victory very much like Johnson’s in 1964. He was winning the East and Midwest and much of the West by margins far larger than Franklin Roosevelt’s; his job rating fell in 1963 only among white Southerners after he supported what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Here’s my take from November of 1999.
THE POLLS WERE RIGHT: A reader pollster rebuts the notion that this year, the polls failed to predict what was going on. They predicted it well, but people like the editors of the New York Times refused to believe them. He also rebuts the notion that polls are getting less reliable, because of cellphones, caller i.d. and so on. Over to my correspondent:
I counted up the margin of victory for all Senate elections from 1992 to 1996, and then looked at how far off the polls were in projecting those margins. Then I looked at this year. (I used the polls listed in Hotline in both instances and only looked at polls conducted the final three weeks of the campaign.) Here’s what I found: from 1992-1996, 21 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by 10 points or more. In 2002, 16 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by 10 points or more. From 1992-1996, 55 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by five points or more. In 2002, 43 percent of polls missed the margin of victory by five points or more.
So the polls this year were actually more accurate than in the past.
THE WIN WAS BIG: And in case you’re impressed by an apparent 53-47 split, check out the UPI tally of votes cast for either Dems or Republicans. Of those votes, the GOP won by 4.4 points in all Senate races and by 5.6 points in gubernatorial races. Of all votes cast, the GOP won 51.6 percent, compared to 45 percent for the Democrats – a 6.6 percent lead. That’s bigger than Clinton’s margin in 1992 and bigger than the Democrats’ victory in the House in 1992 (which netted them a majority of 82). Take out the gerrymandering, have competitive districts across the country, and the real sweep would have been huge – only a smidgen less than the Gingrich revolution in 1994.
The Dish 