Today's "Good News about the Presidential Polling" post

Over the last few days, several news venues have announced that Bush had made some small but measurable gains in nationwide opinion polling. An article from Thursday on The Emerging Democratic Majority Weblog gives some reason to believe that this improvement is relatively unimportant. In the "purple states"--the states which, realistically, could go either for Bush or for Kerry, Bush's position has either not improved or has actually worsened since the end of March, and Kerry's position has either stayed stable or improved.

And now check out these just-released findings from the same ABC News poll that contributed to Democrats' anguish about Bush being ahead. According to data in The Hotline... Kerry is ahead of Bush by 4 points in the battleground states (50-46). He's even ahead of Bush by 2 points in these states with Nader thrown into the mix and drawing a ridiculous 7 percent.

Note also that Bush's approval rating in the battleground states is 49 percent, 2 points under his national rating and that his approval rating on the economy in these states is just 41 percent, 3 points under his national rating.

Interestingly, if you look closely at recent Gallup poll results, there are also signs of poor recent Bush performance in battleground states (or, as they call them "purple states"). Their latest poll had Bush ahead overall among likely voters by 5 points. But he is only tied with Kerry in the purple states. Moreover, that represents a 6 point decline for Bush in the purple states compared to Gallup's March 26-28 survey.

One must be cautious about these data, of course, because of sample size and other problems (though note that the ABC News battleground states sample is probably 300 or so, which is a pretty decent size). But they do lead me to a hypothesis about Bush's recent improved performance in trial heat questions. Instead of getting more votes where he needs them--in the battleground states--his posturing is mostly driving up his support in the hardcore red states, where he doesn't need them. If that's true, Democrats should definitely not be intimidated by recent poll results. Bush is preaching to the converted--which can make him look better in a national poll--but he's not winning many new converts where it counts.

Bush is pumping a lot of money into advertising already--he's spent an estimated $50 million in the six weeks since Kerry effectively clinched the nomination. But it's not doing a lot of good in the battleground states.

It would be nice if the wave of terrible news over the last few weeks would make Bush's ardent supporters less supporting. But that's not going to happen. About 40% of the American electorate is going to vote for Bush under almost any likely scenario, just as about 40% is going to vote for Kerry. It's the remaining 20% who will decide the election, and the evidence is that they're leaning Kerryward in the places where it matters.

It's still six and a half months.

I Tell You, I Tell You, I Tell You...

we must blog.

Billmon, proprietor of Whiskey Bar, has been on fire for the last few days:

( Evidence thereof within, frightening and funny by turns )

And more. If you can stomach to read politics, you should read him.

Hey, all you people with PDAs

Go tell del_c what he should buy and what he should load onto it. I'm interested in the answers to most of his questions myself.

Omnia Iraqi En Tres Partes Divisia Est

Last week, Jim Henley posted what could, with fairness though not complete accuracy, be called "A Non-Interventionist's Manifesto", outlining his vision of pulling back US military intervention worldwide. It's an interesting piece, and deserves reflection. I think that Jim overestimates the degree to which we can withdraw from the Mideast without causing vastly more chaos and suffering than we're causing now by our presence, chaos and suffering which would inspire more of the hatred and terror he's trying to quell--but it's not an issue that he's neglecting, he's just reaching a different conclusion than I do.

Jim pointed today to a post inspired by his post on a blog I have not previously encountered, Jay Currie's One Damn Thing After Another. The post, "One Way out of Iraq", is also worth reading, and outlines the case for splitting Iraq into three constituent nations. I wrote this as a comment to that post, but there's a limit on comment length there, so I'm posting it here instead.

There are three big problems with partitioning Iraq. None of them is necessarily a reason not to do it, but they're all real concerns.

The first two are external: Turkey and Iran.

Turkey really strongly opposes the idea of an autonomous Kurdish republic, and might actually go to war to destroy an independent Kurdish state. I'm not sure how much the US should care about alienating Turkey--I mean, what are they going to do to us, stop taking our massive foreign aid package? (Can anyone explain to me the importance of Turkey as a military ally in the post Cold War world? We've demonstrated the ability to deploy absolutely staggering amount of military power in the Mideast without Turkey's cooperation.) But the potential humanitarian consequences to the Kurds are not insignificant if Turkey were to invade.

Iran would love to have a Shi'ite ally on its western border. I don't think that it would become a complete Iranian sock-puppet, but it does strike me as a matter of concern to have a belligerent Shi'ite alliance directly on the eastern edge of the Saudi oil fields. Apparently the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia are, themselves, Shi'ite-dominated. One thing which would be significantly worse than having the world's largest oil reserves controlled by the Saudis, Saddam Hussein, and the Ayatollahs would be having all of them controlled by the Ayatollahs.

The third problem is internal. While Iraq does split roughly into three areas, there is a lot of interpentration--Shi'ites in Baghdad, Sunnis in Basra, Arabs (and Turkomen) in Mosul. I fear that a partition would lead to retaliatory violence within each of the provinces, and then to violence among them. Also, I am reluctant to see the secular minority of southern Iraq forced to choose between living in a Shi'ite theocracy or fleeing. and it's clear that would be the extent of their choice. Shi'ite reactionaries have been pushing secularists into hiding already, including destroying liquor shops and forcing Iraqi women--formerly among the most liberated in the Muslim world--into veils and other concealments.

All that said, I am not sure that continued US presence will make things better. Iraq is a Frankenstein country, and the choices do seem to fall broadly into "force the three parts to stay together, by whatever means necessary" and "allow them to split apart". Both have downsides, both to the people there and to the people in nearby (and even far-away) lands, and I can't see far enough into the future to tell which approach is most likely to produce a better world.

So there's my ambivalent manifesto for the day.