If Bush goes, we go

No artigo de Mark Steyn, nesta edição da Spectator:

What’s up with Hawaii? Two polls in two Honolulu newspapers over the weekend showed George W. Bush with a small lead over John Kerry. That’s not supposed to be happening. Hawaii’s solidly Democrat. It’s a swing state only in the sense noted by Elvis (‘And when she starts to sway/I gotta say/She really moves the grass around’). Neither candidate has bothered looking in on the joint, or even advertising there. Instead, Senator Kerry’s been frantically bouncing around the Great Lakes — Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. It’s gonna kill him if he’s got to zip halfway across the Pacific every other day to shore up his base with a hastily arranged coconut-shooting expedition on the beach at Waikiki.

One poll would have been easy to dismiss. But two make a trend. And so, for Bush, as the old song says, ‘Hello, Hawaii, How Are Ya?’ Whereas for Kerry, as the even older song says — 1878, written by Queen Liliuokalani — it’s ‘Aloha Oe, or Farewell To Thee’. Since joining the Union, Hawaii has voted for the Democrat presidential nominee by some of the largest margins in the land every election day except two: in 1972 they went for Nixon and in 1984 for Reagan. So one could argue, as some psephologists are doing, that this is in line with Hawaii’s tendency to vote for Republicans when they’re incumbents (George Bush Sr being the exception to that rule).
(...)

As if to demonstrate the meaninglessness of their game, last week the pollsters at Harris released their latest findings in two versions. Using the model of likely voters that proved accurate in 2000, Bush led Kerry by 51 to 43. However, if you discard that model and use some new model factoring in a lot of folks who didn’t bother to vote in 2000, Bush leads Kerry only by 48 to 46. Which is accurate? The first? The second? Neither? Harris can’t say. Is there a third model that shows Kerry leading by 73 to 26? Doubtful. If there was, some pollster would surely have come up with it by now. Maybe some other model entirely is the one to use, but it seems unlikely any one will devise it before next Tuesday.

So my hunch that that first Harris poll is the correct one is only that — a hunch that Bush is ahead outside the margin of error. Unfortunately, on election day, he also has to be ahead outside the margin of lawyer, which is a tougher call. The Democrats already have thousands of chad-chasers circling the courthouses in Florida, Ohio, New Mexico and even New Hampshire, alas. It’s important for Bush to win big enough both to compensate for Democrat fraud and to deter litigation.

[João Silva]