I generally don't read National Review Online, but my curiousity was piqued by the teaser paragraph on Google.news for Bob Dole pollster Tony Fabrizio's column:
Am I the only person in America who noticed that the chief strategist of the Bush-Cheney campaign, Matt Dowd, inadvertently predicted Bush's loss to John Kerry...
Clicking through to the text of the article, I was rather surprised by Fabrizio's unabashed critique of his Bush Administration counterpart, Matthew Dowd, particularly Dowd's email to Bush/Cheney supporters warning of a rather significant Kerry bounce leading up to and immediately following the Democratic Convention.
I understand that Dowd and company want to set expectations low, but isn't a prediction of a 15-point shortfall in August a bit over the top? Won't even Bush's most ardent supporters see the race as lost if he is down by 15 percent at that point? Worse still, Dowd is predicting this a month before he thinks it will actually happen, and yet he doesn't offer a plan to combat it!
Fabrizio has good reason for concern: Bush Sr.'s favorable rating dropped 12 points after the 1992 Clinton-Gore Democratic Convention in NYC to 29%, it's lowest level in his presidency, and down from a high of 92% in February, 1991, at the peak of the first Gulf War. He got a 10 point bounce out of the GOP Convention two weeks later, but saw his poll numbers retreat from that blip, back down to the mid-30's throughout the summer and fall of '92.
As a pollster himself, one expects Fabrizio might know a thing or two about the subject. It's rather surprising that Matt Dowd seems so blaze' about the possibility of plummeting favorables for his boss. Perhaps he knows something the rest of us, including out-of-the-loop Republicans, don't.
Posted by MB Williams at July 8, 2004 12:36 PM | TrackBack