The 2004 Election - The Undecided Vote

2:30 P.M.

So what I've done is taken five months worth of polls, the Associated Press-Ipsos polls for April, May, June, July and the first week of August, and combined all those numbers, so it's a total of 3,719 registered voters, and of those 3,719 there are 327 of them were undecided voters.

Now let me run through these numbers. If you ask all the registered voters nationwide, "Do you think the country is headed in the right direction, or do you think it's off on the wrong track?" Right direction, [or] wrong track? The right direction number for all registered voters is 41, the off on the wrong track is 56. Now, that is not a good number for an incumbent. Now, we've seen a lot worse, but that is not a good number for an incumbent.

But if you just look at the undecided voters, only 19 percent think the country is headed in the right direction, 74 percent say the country is off on the wrong track; 19 percent right direction, 74 percent wrong track. That is really ugly. Really, really ugly.

When you look at job approval for the President among all voters nationwide, 49 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove. Okay, that falls pretty much as the polls we've seen lately, 49/49. But among the undecided voters or people that are undecided between Kerry/Edwards/Nader, it's 25 percent approve, 68 percent disapprove the job President Bush is doing. Again, that's a very, very ugly group of people.

You look at approve/disapprove of the President's handling of the economy, for example. Among all voters, 46 percent approve, 52 percent disapprove. But among undecided voters, only 24 percent approve, 69 percent disapprove.

And, finally, look at party identification. Who are these people that are undecided? Now, as I spoke about earlier, we've seen the two parties basically evenly divided for the last two years. We've seen Democrats open up a bit of an advantage over the last few months and now again over these five months there's a 6-point Democratic advantage among registered voters, 49 to 43. But among the undecided voters, it's 43 percent Democrat to 25 percent Republican, an 18-point Democratic advantage with 32 percent of them, just under a third of them, are independent. So there's 18-point more Democratic than Republican among those undecided voters.

Looking at this, I think it would realistic to assume that if you had the election today, President Bush would probably get somewhere between 19 and 25 percent of the undecided vote, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the undecided vote, and John Kerry would get the rest of it.

Now, what am I not saying? I am not saying that this race is over. I am not saying that this race is John Kerry's to lose. I hate that expression. But what I would say is that if the dynamics of this race remain the same, if the fundamentals of the race remain the same for the next 82 days -- I guess it is, 81, 82 days -- then President Bush is not going to get reelected, that he needs something to happen to shake this race up. To be perfectly honest, I don't think it's just the President doing well and John Kerry doing badly in the debate. I think it's got to be something bigger than that. But this thing, it's not setting up well for the President at all.

And I would argue that I think the Bush campaign has executed almost flawlessly. I can't point to a single significant mistake the Bush campaign has made. And, to be honest, I think their advertising is better than the Kerry campaign advertising. But I think that they are a victim, to a certain extent, of circumstances beyond their control over the last year, and then you could obviously make an argument that policy decisions made before the campaign was even begun have caused them some problems as well. You can certainly make that case. But this is not a campaign problem. It's a problem of forces much larger than the campaign that have made this very, very difficult for the President.

And again, I think in some ways John Kerry is one of the luckiest people alive. I don't think he really won the Democratic nomination. I think the two frontrunners for the Democratic nomination, Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt, killed each other in Iowa in sort of a murder-suicide pact and destroyed each other. (Laughter.) John Kerry went out. His campaign was absolutely dead in the water. In early December he borrowed $6.4 million, mortgaging his half of the house he had with his wife on Beacon Hill because there was no money coming in his campaign. He mortgaged his house. He had the money, had a reasonably good organization in place, and when the top two candidates killed each other in Iowa he was in a position to shoot the gap. Edwards was basically in even worse shape than that, but he was able to shoot the gap as well, particularly after he got a Des Moines Register endorsement the week or so before the election.

And the rest is history, but I think it's a fascinating situation. But I do want to emphasize that the race is not over, but that this is pretty tough sledding for the President right now. I mean, he's in a tough situation.

Let me just touch on Congress very, very, very quickly. I don't think that there's any realistic chance of Republicans losing control of the House of Representatives. There just aren't enough races out there. There are about three dozen races in the entire country, competitive races out of 435. Of those, half of them are already held by Democrats. Plus, Democrats are going to lose probably three to six seats in Texas and so they've got to pick up three to six more in the other 49 states, then pick up 11 or now 12 more elsewhere. I just don't think that's likely to happen.

The U.S. Senate, if we were talking in January or February, I would have said there was an 80 or 90 percent chance that Republicans would hold onto the Senate. Today, I think it's probably closer to 60 or 70, maybe a little closer to 70 percent chance. But where there have been some changes in the senate races, some deterioration, by and large it has nothing to do with President Bush and a lot more to do with what's going on in each of these individual races. You know, for example, the Republican senator from Colorado, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, changing his mind and deciding to retire after all, so a seat that was almost certain to stay Republican, suddenly it's very, very, very competitive, with Democrats ahead by a little bit. So I think there's probably a 60, 70 percent chance of Republicans holding onto the Senate, 95 percent chance they hold onto the House, but right now the presidential race is looking pretty tough for them.

Let me just close on one thing and then we can open it up for questions or comments or accusations. I've traveled to, I would guess, 34, 35, 36 states since the 1st of January and met with literally tens of thousands of people, and as I've traveled around the country I am struck with the almost universal feeling among American voters that George W. Bush and John Kerry are extremely different people, that would be very different presidents, and that would take the country in very, very different directions. Now, one half of these people believe that it's incredibly important that we reelect President Bush, and the other half thinks it's incredibly important that he be defeated, but there's almost universal feeling among Americans that this race is huge and it's a race of real consequences.

The second almost universal truth is an expectation that this is going to be a really close race. [In 2000] nobody had any idea that we could come down to a presidential race, 104-105 million votes cast, and it would be decided by 537 votes in one state and it would take 36 days to count. Nobody thought that was possible. Now everybody sort of understands that it's not only possible but that this is likely, very likely, to be a very close race.

That's why I think this is going to be a huge turnout election, at least by American standards. I think that you're going to see the highest voter turnout we've seen in 20 years, maybe the highest we've seen in 30 years. And for two reasons: number one, polls tell us that there's an enormous amount of interest in this election, much more than normal, where there's a feeling that this election is important, it has consequences and it's going to be close and that every vote counts, or at least if you live in 15 or 16 states your vote counts. But anyway, but it's just incredibly important.

And the second thing is, I think, on the part of both parties you will see the most incredible voter identification, get-out-the-vote program that the Democratic Party has ever run and exactly the same thing on the Republican side, that you're going to have the two parties dragging their bases out in enormous numbers and then spontaneously sort of, you know, the push, the will for people to vote. I think it's going to be a very, very, very high turnout. Again, maybe not by European standards, but by our standards I think it will be a very, very high turnout.

But again we have 81, 82 days before the election, something like that. We've got some time. Things could change, but right now the fundamentals would seem to favor the challenger.

MR. DENIG: All right, let's go to New York for our first question. New York, go ahead, please.

QUESTION: Yeah, I have two questions.

MR. DENIG: Identify yourself, please.

QUESTION: My name is Guillemette Fauré. I am with Le Figaro, the French newspaper.

So, first, I would like to know what you expect from the Republican Convention and, second, I'd like to know, since undecided voters are said to be not really paying a lot of attention to the campaign, how important it is that George Bush goes fishing for Ourdoor Life Network or that Bruce Springsteen goes singing in the swing states.

MR. COOK: Thank you. First of all, I guess this Republican event shall be my 14th national party convention -- Boston was my 13th -- so there's not a lot that's new for me. I don't expect I don't expect a lot out of these conventions and, in fact, if you look at the Democratic Convention, I don't think there was anything of any importance the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday nights of the convention.

To be honest, if I were the Democrats, in retrospect, I would have gone to the three big broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS and NBC -- and I would have said, "Look, I don't care if you carry one minute of a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday night. If you just give us the whole two hours on the Thursday night, we'll be happy." Because I think each of these parties, they don't have four nights worth of stuff to say. They can't hold anybody's attention for four nights, not even the people who are sitting in the room. But I think each of these parties are perfectly capable of putting up two really good hours and it's a shame that the networks don't give them two solid hours without talking heads interrupting. I think that's a real shame.

You know, I think Republicans need to -- they've got some messages they need to -- they've got a challenge. I mean, they've got to reach to the middle and grab these voters that are in the middle, both in terms of partisanship and ideology, but at the same time, they've got to keep their base really revved up.

Now, to be honest, I don't think either party's going to have a problem getting their base together. I just don't think that. So I would say it's more important to reach to the middle, which is why you've got people like Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City; John McCain; Arnold Schwarzenegger. You've got people like that speaking who are people to reach -- you know, reach to the middle.

So I think it's just to try to give people a certain comfort level of what the next four years would be like. I think they do have to articulate a vision of the next four years of where they would take the country, because I don't think they've left a clear impression of what the next four years would be like, and, you know, what happens post-Iraq.

In terms of the second question, I think you're absolutely right that undecided voters tend to be people who -- and I know all of you are going to find this shocking -- they don't read newspapers, they don't read newsmagazines, they don't watch the television news. They are largely disengaged from the political process. They don't pay a lot of attention. And as -- and they usually don't pay attention until the last two or three weeks until the election.

But just because they're not paying attention now doesn't mean that we can't take a glimpse and figure out who they are and what makes them tick, and that's why looking at these data that tells us that they're pretty sour about where the country is, they're pretty sour about the economy, and they're not real crazy about President Bush, that you have some clues about where they're more likely to go than not, if nothing big changes this race.

Now, do, you know, having Bruce Springsteen and all these celebrities out there, does it reach to some of them? Oh, I don't know, maybe. You know, doesn't do any harm, I suppose. But, you know, I think these people are worried about their kids getting their homework done and they've got lives, they've got very full lives, and politics just doesn't intrude upon their lives until the last week or two before the election. So I tend to be skeptical about how much some of these other things reach them.

Having said that, though, if you don't have people that read newspapers, then getting to them can mean communicating with them through, you know, Jay Leno and the Tonight Show, or, you know, Letterman or some of these other shows. I guess that's one way to try to reach them. But, you know, generally speaking, it's an exercise in futility.

MR. DENIG: Please use the microphone. Identify yourself and your news organization and keep your questions short. We'll start in the first row.

MR. COOK: And I'll try to keep the answers shorter. Sorry.

QUESTION: Thank you. José López, Mexican News Agency. There's been a lot of talk in this campaign about the importance of the Hispanic vote. Both parties are spending more money now than in 2000. There's an unprecedented effort to mobilize voters in the southwest. Do you agree with the perception that the Hispanic vote will be decisive in November? How would you rate the efforts of both Republicans and Democrats, you know, to court the Hispanic vote? And what's the real universe of undecided Hispanic voters that really could make a difference?

MR. COOK: Ooh. I wish you hadn't asked that last part, because I haven't looked at that. Let me do it a different way. In close elections, everything matters, and when you've got the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, then, you know, obviously, that matters.

Now, I think you have to segment it out and say, "Okay, where do Hispanic voters live?" Now, to the extent that you have a lot of Hispanic voters in California and New York, two states that John Kerry's going to win easily, then those sort of don't matter. To the extent that you have a lot in Texas, that doesn't matter either, because President Bush is going to carry Texas easily. It'll matter in some House races, but not in the Presidential race.

But you do have an unusually large number of states with large Hispanic populations in play: Florida, New Mexico, Arizona. Nevada has -- I think has the fastest-growing Hispanic population in the country is in the Las Vegas area. And so you've got an unusually large number of races -- of states that are in play, as we say, with very large Hispanic populations.

And I would argue that the shift in the Hispanic vote in Florida has turned a state that was pretty Republican into a state that's just teetering right on the edge. You know, for years and years and years, the vast majority of Hispanic voters in Florida were Cubans, who, you know, overwhelmingly voted Republican. Now there are more Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans living in Florida than there are Cubans and that's sort of tilted the balance, the Hispanic balance, away from Republicans and toward Democrats and it's one of the main reasons why Florida has gone from being a Republican state to a classic swing state. The last poll I saw in Florida, Kerry was ahead by 4 percentage points, for example, and a lot of that is a shift in the Hispanic vote.

So I think the Hispanic vote will be, you know, one of the very most -- probably the single most important demographic group and one of the most important target groups for both parties, where President Bush needs to improve his performance over where he was four years ago and it's not at all clear that that's going to happen now.

MR. DENIG: Let's go to the second row here, please.

QUESTION: I'm Pascal Riché with Liberation from France.

MR. COOK: Yes.

QUESTION: You say that Bush didn't do any big mistake during the campaign?

MR. COOK: I'm talking, technically speaking, the campaign has executed extremely well.

QUESTION: Yeah, but what about the choice of his running mate? Do you think that it was a mistake and do you think it is still possible for him to change over for -- for Cheney to have a heart problem and be replaced by somebody like Giuliani or somebody more on the middle?

MR. COOK: Obviously, you know, it's legal for him to change between now and the Republican Convention. I don't think it's going to happen. Let me sort of back up and do this -- develop it more fully. I don't think there's any question that Dick Cheney was a huge asset for Governor Bush back in 2000, that there were a lot of people who liked George Bush, they liked him a great deal, they were leaning towards him, but it did bother them that he had never served in Congress before, he had never worked in Washington, had no foreign policy or national security experience. And so having a former Congressman, former Republican leadership member, former White House Chief of Staff, former Secretary of Defense on board as the Vice President, that gave them a comfort level and I think it was very, very, very important for President Bush in 2000.

Now, is Dick Cheney an asset today? No, of course not. I mean, I don't think anybody would say, realistically, with a straight face, that Dick Cheney is an asset in 2004. Is he a liability? First of all, when I come across people who are very, very, very critical of President -- of Americans that are very, very, very critical of Vice President Cheney, they tend to come in two groups. One is Democrats and liberals who just hate him, but they're going to vote against President Bush no matter what, and so they don't really count for this, okay?

Then you have Republicans and Independents who believe that the Vice President may have given the President some very bad advice and that, because the President may have taken some of that advice, has caused the President enormous damage. But when I talk to those kinds of people, they're going to support the President anyway; they just think that he's badly damaged because he listened to Cheney, but they're going to vote anyway.

I don’t know that firing Cheney would get the President any new votes. I really don't. Now, in some ways, I think the President is in a rough situation with where his dad was back in 1992. Now, 1992, no question about it, Vice President Dan Quayle was a liability for President Bush. There's no question about it. Now, was he as big a liability as, say, a lousy economy that wasn't turning around fast enough? No, he wasn't that big a liability. Was he as big a liability as, say, Vice President Bush saying, "Read my lips, no new taxes," and then raising taxes and alienating the conservative base of the party? No, he wasn't that big of a liability, but he was a liability. But I think the Bush White House and President Bush was faced with a situation where the damage of dumping Quayle and of admitting that you had made a mistake on something that was really pretty darn important was greater than the damage of just keeping him and sending him off to small towns and keeping him out of the way.

And so, you know, you have to do sort of a cost-benefit analysis and, at this point, I think the benefit of dumping the Vice President would not anywhere near reach the damage of basically saying that the first decision you made as the Republican nominee for President, you screwed up. And so I just don't see that happening.

Now, in terms of picking someone like a Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, or a John McCain or, you know, Colin Powell or some of these types of people -- great, very great people, particularly the Secretary of State -- the problem with that, number one, is all of these people are pretty liberal on domestic and social and cultural issues, pro-choice on the abortion issue, tend to be pro-gun control, tend to be pro-gay rights, that sort of thing. You put any of those people on the ticket, I think, and conservatives would go out of their minds. I mean, President Bush would go into a nosedive like you have not seen if he put any of those people on the ticket and, to be honest, I'm not sure that he would pull enough people -- if any of these people could pull enough people from the middle on board the Bush camp to make up for the leakage you would have coming out of the conservative side. Because a lot of the people that they might tend to pull from have already -- they don’t like President Bush. They're not going to vote for him no matter what, and so I don't think that that would really do it a lot of good.

So, number one, I don’t think it's going to happen and, number two, I think, at this point, I don't think it would help. I really don't think it would help President Bush.

MR. DENIG: Yes, take the gentleman on the left there.

QUESTION: My name is Yoshio Miyasaka for Kyodo News, Japanese news agency. I have two questions. The first one is, you stressed that the Bush campaign -- Bush camp should shake these campaign dynamics. So what would be the possible potential factor which can shake these dynamics? It is capturing Usama Bin Laden or --

MR. COOK: That would be a big help. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: -- or some new initiative, police initiative by the Bush camp? And the second question is, what made this U.S. so divided and polarized country? Who should we blame for this polarization?

MR. COOK: Oh, wow. (Laughter.)

MR. DENIG: The second question would take too long.

MR. COOK: Yeah, the second one -- you know, you can probably write a book on that. Let's do that one after the election. That would be a great symposium sometime, to have five people up here and talk about that, because it probably took a long time to develop and there are probably a multitude of causes.

First of all, I'm not sure what, during the campaign, could happen. I mean, I don't think -- as I said, I don’t think just a strong performance by the President or, I mean, I'm not sure that Kerry could screw the debates up enough that would change the fundamentals of this race. You know, whether the President comes out for overhauling the entire U.S. tax code and going to a broad-based flatter tax or something, I tend to think that that wouldn't do it. I think it's more likely going to be external events.

But the thing about it is, you know, when has American politics remained static for 81, 82 days? Now, you know, you could argue that we actually have been pretty static for the last four or five months but, given that, it seems to be even less likely that we're going to be static for another two and a half months, with sort of no fundamental change. You know, if they could find Usama Bin Laden, that would help a lot.

I mean, you know, God forbid, if there's another terrorist attack, what would that do? You know, we all hope and pray that that doesn't happen. If it were to happen, I think at least initially, Americans, whenever there's an international crisis, we always rally around our presidents. We rally around the flag, is the phrase, and that I think you would immediately see the President's approval rating go sky-high and people would pull behind the President in a very meaningful way. It would last for days, weeks, you know, some period of time, hard to say what period of time.

I think there might be a second phase where people would probably step back after a few days and look at the attack and say, "Was this something that, gosh, it probably couldn't have been stopped, there's no way we could have stopped this," or do they look at it and say, "Gosh, you know, we should have been able to stop that one." And without knowing the nature of the attack or the circumstances, there's no way to guess which way Americans would conclude.

You know, the third, and the real danger, I think, for the President would be if there is a third phase and if it were to trigger a reevaluation of priorities in the last three years. You know, gee, maybe we should have spent all this money doing this rather than going after Iraq or, you know, something like that. Now, that would be, you know, the really bad scenario for President Bush that could be triggered by another attack. So, initially, I think it would help him enormously and, after that, you really can argue that it would go either way.

But I think it would be -- I don't think -- I think if this race changes, if the fundamentals of this race change, I don't think it's anything that would -- President Bush would do. It would probably be some external event that would drive -- that would change the race.

MR. DENIG: All right, to Khalid in the way back there, please.

QUESTION: Hi, Khalid Abdul-Karim with Middle East News Agency of Egypt. You just spoke about the Hispanic vote and I wonder if you can give us an update on the African Americans and Jewish Americans. You know, they vote predominantly pro-Democrat. Arabs and Muslims, in the past elections, voted predominantly for President Bush. What's your update this time? Do we have any change?

And if, quickly, you can just move to how Kerry is doing when it comes to security and foreign policy. It seems that he is narrowing the gap when it comes to security, according to one poll. Thank you.

MR. COOK: Well, let's see. I think President Bush got -- was it 6 or 8 percent of the African American vote in 2000 -- 8 percent. I don’t see any reason why it would be any bigger than that and I think it would probably be a little bit smaller. You know, 8 percent, 7, 6, something like that, but it would be either the same or smaller this time.

I think while Kerry will win a clear majority of the Jewish vote, it will be a lot smaller percentage than -- it will be a smaller majority than Al Gore had. I think there's no question that among Jewish voters and voters of the Jewish faith that President Bush will do better than any Republican has done in a long time.

I think you probably would see -- and again, a lot of this is guessing because you do a thousand-sample poll and you're only talking about a dozen or so people of the Jewish faith or Arabs, and so you have to kind of combine lots of data and make some guesses. I think it's, you know, very clear that the President will do a lot worse among Arab Americans than he would have done four years ago. You know, my guess is he probably picks up a little bit more on the Jewish side than he loses on the Arab side, just of sheer numbers, but that there's a certain amount of offsetting that would take place there.

You know, foreign policy -- I think what's happening, rather than Kerry growing, I would say it's more the President declining, that the foreign policy/national security/ fighting terrorism, those assets have declined since September 12th, if you will, first of all, just from general time, secondly, obviously, the war. You know, and it's, you know, the lack of a clear connection to 9/11, the problem with not finding WMDs has, you know, I mean, obviously, it's eroded some of the primary justifications stated at the time for the war. You know, it's not news. It's created problems for him. Of course it has. But it's been very, very messy. We've had a lot of casualties, and it's pretty obvious what's happened. And so I would say it's more a decline in strength [on the part of the President] and, at the same time, I think Kerry has used his Vietnam War record pretty effectively to kind of inoculate himself from being sort of the weak on defense.

I saw recently an interview with George McGovern, who was the Democratic candidate against President Nixon in 1972, and he just got savaged for being weak on defense, and he was regretting the fact that he had not used his own war record when he ran for president, that he had been a bomber pilot in World War II, highly decorated, with something like, what, a quarter of the crews in his unit were killed or injured. He didn't play it up and Kerry's not making that mistake. So I think there's a little bit of that as well.

MR. DENIG: You have time for one more?

MR. COOK: Yeah, sure, great.

MR. DENIG: Let's go to the middle.

MR. COOK: Even two or three, if you want.

MR. DENIG: Oh, boy. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Yes. I am Ana Barón from Clarin, Argentina. I just wanted to know about the religious -- the right religious vote. They apparently are not going to have a big place in the convention. Do you think that that can have an effect on the mobilization on getting the vote out and do you think that Bush will put a little bit more the accent, even if he has to stay balanced with the independents?

MR. COOK: I think President Bush's advisors, political advisors, are fixated on one number, 4 million, the number of white evangelical Christians who apparently didn't vote in 2000 and where, in that 2000 campaign, Governor Bush ran very much as sort of a moderate, you know, a compassionate conservative, all that, and in sort of the political vernacular, he didn't throw his base a lot of red meat and, as a result, a lot of them didn't see important distinctions, didn't see distinctions between Bush and Gore and a lot of -- a lot of people in the conservative base of the party, social religious conservatives, simply didn't vote.

That's not a mistake they've made this time. They have courted the evangelical vote enormously. And while yes, you're right, they're not showcasing them in terms of the two or three or four most highly visible posts, I think there's -- one of the top promoters of Christian music is one of the sort of managers of the convention and I'm sure those themes will be there, but I think there's also probably a feeling that they've done a lot so far and that right now they probably need to do a little bit more work on the middle.

You know, that's what politics is all about. Whether you're Republican or Democrat, you have to work your base and reach to the middle at the same time. And, you know, it's easy to do one of them really, really well. It's harder to do both simultaneously. But, you know, in life, you have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time and, you know, they're happy to do that. So I think you'll see them -- whether it's in the four nights of the convention, but in the totality of the campaign, I think you'll see them both, do both, a great deal.

MR. DENIG: All right, we'll take the gentleman right here, please.

QUESTION: I'm Siegfried Buschschlüter from National German Radio. You mentioned something big would have to happen to change the picture and you've answered some of the questions. 9/11 -- another 9/11 might be big enough. What about jobs and the economy? If, say, 250- to 300,000 jobs were to be created in the next two months, would that be big enough?

MR. COOK: Typically, there is a five-, six-month lag time between what happens in the economy and people sort of embracing and digesting and accepting it. And that's why historically, at least if you're just looking at economic statistics, it's the second quarter, it's the April/May/June economic numbers that are the best economic predictor of how a President is going to do, not the July/August/September numbers, I mean, because of that lag time.

If you saw, let's say, 250,000 jobs every month from now to November, that might work. Do I think you're going to see it? No. But that, you know, if you were starting to say, "Okay, what are some things" -- and I'm glad you asked this question -- that if you're going to say, "Okay, what needs to happen for President Bush to get reelected?" And, in fact, what I would do if I were you is, every morning, when you get up and you get your Washington Post and your New York Times and your Los Angeles Times and every -- and your Wall Street Journal and such, look at it and say, "Is there anything here that will fundamentally -- that really helps the President enormously?? You know, and ask that for each individual day, at the end of seven days, at the end of each month, and say, "Is there anything that just gives him a hell of a boost?"

Now, you have 250 -- 200- to 250,000 a month, that would help a lot, but it would have to be like, every month, you know, from here on and, you know, that's like pulling an inside straight in poker at this point. We're going to have probably an up month and a down month and the broader trend lines are certainly going to get better, but it's going to be better by doing like this and it's got to be enough to convince voters in Michigan, in Ohio or Pennsylvania.

In fact, one rule of thumb I would use if I were you is this: You take Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Whoever wins two out of three of those is probably going to be the next President. Now, if I had to say, okay, if that's wrong, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, there is a way that if President Bush only won one out of those three -- the only way -- there's kind of a little back door where if he won two out of three of, say, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin to undo the damage of not having gotten a second one of the first three, that's a little bitty trap door in the back. But, you know, we're kind of grasping for straws at this point. I mean, he needs to win two out of those three.

MR. DENIG: Okay. We need to end the formal session for our cameras right now, so I'll thank Charlie Cook very much for coming. I'd like to continue with Helsinki in the back row there, please.

QUESTION: Yes, Jiri Raivio, Helsingen Sanomat, Finland. How important will the debates be in wooing these undecided voters, the televised debates, the three of them?

MR. COOK: Yeah. The problem with debates swinging these voters is I don't think these are the kind of people that are likely to listen to more than the first 10 minutes of debates. You know, again, they're not terribly engaged people. I think, clearly, the debates made a difference in 2000. The expectations for Al Gore were extremely high. The expectations for Governor Bush were very low. Gore went on the debates and he sort of sighed into the microphone loudly eight times or seven or nine or whatever and acted condescending and he screwed it up. I mean, I think clearly, I mean, you know, Al Gore was ahead going into the first debate and he was behind coming out of it and was behind from then on. Clearly, the debates cost him the election. But the thing is, that was an open seat where neither one of these folks were the incumbent.

I think in an incumbent race, how people perceive that President in the previous four years, you know, is a lot more important than, you know, how a two-hour debate goes. I mean, I do think that, you know, my advice to John Kerry is not to screw up the debates, but I think the debates are a lot more important in an open, non-incumbent presidential election than it is in one involving incumbents. But I think it's got to be bigger than just doing well or doing badly in a debate to alter the structure of this race.

MR. DENIG: Let's go to India here in the front, please.

QUESTION: Parasuram, Press Trust of India. What is the basic difference with the parties, between the Republicans and the Democrats? Who is the average voter? What do we look for, the difference between the two parties?

MR. COOK: Well, I think they're, by standards of the rest of the world, I guess our parties aren't that different, but we think they are. I mean, by our standards, they are. You know, there's -- typically, there are exceptions to every rule, but, typically, the Democratic Party is a party of larger government and more governmental involvement and the Republican Party is the party of less. Now, there are exceptions to that; for example, abortion. You know, it would be the exact opposite. But, for the most part, that's it.

Now, the thing is, historically, the Republican Party has been the party that represented more affluent people and the Democratic Party has been the party that represented people downscale, more lower-income. Now we're seeing some changes there. We are seeing some relatively high-income, highly educated voters who, economically speaking, if you looked at their income tax returns, they ought to be Republicans, but some of those people are starting to vote more and more Democratic because of social and cultural issues: abortion, gun control, you know, environment, those kinds of issues. And then in terms of downscale whites, we're starting to see some of those people who, economically speaking, ought to be Democrats that are voting more and more Republican, again, because of abortion, guns, you know, issues like that. So, rather than being a strictly economic up and down, it's kind of becoming more diagonal where it's a blending of economic self-interest and then social/cultural issues here.

And just as an example of that was the 2000 presidential election, where you had three middle class to upper middle class suburban counties right outside of Philadelphia, counties that usually vote Republican -- Montgomery, Bucks and Delaware Counties, Pennsylvania – and all three of them voted for Al Gore. And then you took heavily Democratic West Virginia -- I mean, Republicans never win in West Virginia -- and George Bush won West Virginia. And if, before that election, if somebody had told me that George Bush were going to carry West Virginia, I would have guessed that Bush was winning the country in a landslide. But if somebody had told me that Al Gore was going to carry Montgomery, Bucks and Delaware Counties, Pennsylvania, I would have thought, "Oh gosh, Gore's winning in a landslide."

So we're seeing a real shift in that, so it's a combination of income-driven and these social and cultural issues, and then throw in the war for good measure.

MR. DENIG: Okay, let's go to Thomas in the middle, please.

QUESTION: Thomas Gorguissian, An-Nahar, Lebanon. Mr. Cook, knowing the psyche and the mentality and the history of this election, how do you describe the feeling of American voters or, in general, with this idea of having observers coming from OSCE to watch the elections and look at the -- how the process is going on?

My second question is related. What are the possibilities of a rerun of Florida? Yesterday or the day before yesterday, there was NBC's report about Ohio punching votes and all these things. Is there any possibility?

MR. COOK: I would say that 99 percent of Americans wouldn't have the faintest idea what the OSCE is -- (laughter) -- and wouldn't have the faintest idea what an election observer is and wouldn't care. I'm being very blunt.

We have probably never had a perfect election where, mechanically speaking, everything was absolutely flawless and accurate. You know, we probably never have those. But the thing is, the vast majority of our elections aren't close. I mean, it's an overwhelmingly Democratic seat or overwhelmingly Republican seat or an enormously popular figure on one side or the other and so it really -- it really doesn't make any difference in most of these races because they're not terribly competitive. It's only the really, really, really close ones.

And then, in Florida, you know, to use an overused cliché or metaphor, it was like the perfect storm. I mean, it was like completely unrelated things coming together simultaneously, and, you know, it was just, you know, turned out to be a complete disaster. You know, the odds of that happening, you know, aren't real high, but, you know, in real close elections, you know, hey, you know, I mean, anything can happen.

I think two things I think we have to keep in mind, though. Number one, think about in your newsroom when you started shifting from typewriters to computers. Probably wasn't a pretty sight, you know? It probably wasn't a very smooth transition, was it? Or anytime you adopt any new, huge changes, and particularly changes involving technology, it doesn't work well in short periods of time. You know, it takes time to get all the bugs out, number one.

Number two, I read the other day that the average volunteer working in a polling place in this country is something like 74 years of age. Someone told me in Florida it's actually over 80. You put -- with all do respect to our beloved senior citizens -- but you put people over 74 years of age and throw in technology, and you've got a pretty combustible mixture there. Because the thing about it is, this isn't like going into the bank and going to a teller, someone who does that, you know, 48 weeks a year, except for [vacations], five days a week. I mean, this is somebody that does something, you know, a couple of days a year, you know, and maybe only every other year. I mean, so, you know, it's not a pretty sight. I mean, you know, I mean, it's like snow removal in Washington. (Laughter.) This doesn't happen often enough for them to get good at it.

So, you know, if it's a really close race, could we have problems? Yeah, yeah. And, you know what? It's not necessarily chicanery or anything. We have far more elections than any other country in the world, but we don't have them often enough to really pull it off without any glitches.

MR. DENIG: Let's go to the gentleman in the way back, please.

QUESTION: Olli-Pekka Sulasma of the Finnish Broadcasting Company. When these undecided voters are making their decisions, if they do not pay attention to debates, do they pay attention to campaign ads? What kind of role do they have?

And then you spoke in your remarks about the environment of hatred. There are lots of negative ads. Are they, perhaps, a manifesto of this hatred or are they creating this environment of hatred?

MR. COOK: You know, well, first of all, unfortunately, everyone here -- you know, you all -- most of you probably live here in the Washington area right now and so, unless you watch cable television, you're probably not seeing that many ads. But if you lived in Columbus, Ohio or Orlando, Florida or Phoenix, Arizona, or, you know, any one of another 15, 16 states, you would be absolutely deluged with ads. I mean, it's just nonstop. And I think in television advertising, as in anything else, there's a law of diminishing returns and, after a while, each ad has a little bit less impact than the one before it, to the point where people become desensitized to all the advertising.

You know, you're starting to see some of the campaigns switching to do a little bit more radio, they're going to be doing a lot of mail, you know, they're going to be reaching voters in every imaginable way. I mean, one of the things that, for example, the Americans Coming Together, the pro-Democratic group, is doing is, they'll come up to a doorstep of a swing voter, an undecided voter, and they'll knock on the door, introduce themselves, and say, "Do you have a minute? I'd like to play you an 18 -- " -- and they hold up a Palm Pilot and they'll push a button and play an 18-second message that's geared towards a specific issue that that voter told someone, a canvasser on the telephone a week earlier, that they were most interested in, like, let's say, health care, an 18-second message from the candidate on health care or, you know, something like that.

And then when they go to the next household down the street, there would be a different issue aimed at that person, the environment or whatever they're interested in. So they're just getting bombarded from every imaginable direction. But at the same time, at some point, it's sort of like getting hit with a fire hose. I mean, there's just too much and you start kind of, you know, you go down the floor in a fetal position and cover your head -- (laughter) -- I mean, because, you know, there's nothing else you can do because you're getting overwhelmed.

Meanwhile, somebody living two states over is hardly getting anything. I mean, you know, what's weird is that we've got 20 states where people are getting absolutely surrounded and hammered and 30 states where they're ignored, but it's the nature of our system. But I didn't answer your question really.

There have been studies that show people are three, four, five times more likely to remember a negative piece of information from an ad than a positive piece of information. And I think the reason is that they're more likely to believe something bad about a politician than something good about a politician -- (laughter) -- which is where a lot of our cynicism comes from.

But I think I came close to answering. Maybe one or two more, then I got to go.

MR. DENIG: Okay, let's go up to the lady here.

QUESTION: I am enjoying this. Anyway, my name is --

MR. COOK: Thank you. I am, too.

QUESTION: My name is Jennie Ilustre, Philippine News Days. How about the women's vote? How much of a factor would women voters be in this election?

MR. COOK: Well, women constitute around 51, 52 percent of the electorate, not because their voter turnout is higher but just women tend to live longer than men do so there are just a few more of them. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: They take care of the votes. (Laughter.)

MR. COOK: Yeah, they're counting the votes. (Laughter.) But the thing is, the women's vote, it isn't monolithic. I mean, for example, women who are single, separated, widowed or divorced tend to vote more Democratic. Women who are married tend to vote more Republican. And among married women, women who are married and have kids in the household are more likely to vote Republican than women who do not have children in the household. And so you get all these kind of combinations that are somewhat difficult to explain or understand, but we have those.

Now, does the female vote -- you know, will it vote for John Kerry? Absolutely. Will the male vote go for George Bush? Absolutely. And the question is, does one side win their gender, you know, bigger than the other side wins their gender by, acknowledging that there is, you know, a couple-point disparity in favor of Democrats just because there are more women?

The other thing is that, you know, I think the reason we have these voting patterns, it's not an accident. Chris Matthews on MSNBC, he used to say -- I don't know if he still says this -- but that we have two parties in this country, we have a mommy party and a daddy party. And the mommy party is a caring, nurturing party that emphasizing education and healthcare and daycare and, you know, sort of the compassion constellation of issues; and that the Republican Party, strong national defense, self-reliance, you know, law and order. You know, I mean, you know, a certain -- another set of issues.

And that if you were going to design a party to go after women voters, it would look a lot like the Democratic Party, and if you were going to design a party to go after male voters, it would look at lot like the Republican Party. The fact that there is a gender gap is not an accident. Now, this is grossly stereotyping because there are obviously men who are incredibly liberal and women who are incredibly conservative. But just generally speaking, there's something to those stereotypes and that there's a reason why each party has its own areas of strength.

MR. DENIG: Last question, the gentleman there.

QUESTION: Hi, I'm Josh Chaffin from the Financial Times. I was wondering if there was any picture you can give us of these undecided voters beyond the fact that they're utterly disengaged in terms of where they live in the country or their socioeconomic status or if there's any issue or theme that appears to appeal to them more than others.

MR. COOK: Parts of the country, no. They're everywhere. Demographically speaking, are they, you know, a little bit more working class, middle class? Maybe. Maybe high school educated, maybe just a little bit of college. I mean, it's -- but it's -- they do tend to be more Democratic, but that's probably a function more of education and income than anything else.

But, it's kind of hard to put your finger on it because, on my block, in a neighborhood of some really pretty big, fancy houses, I can come home late in the day and see The Washington Post still in the end of the driveway at some of these houses at 6, 7 o'clock at night and the paper's still there. Meanwhile, I've got my five newspapers out there that I've -- you know, I get them fairly early.

They're all over but they tend to clump, you know, more on the probably the middle third income and education wise, but probably the bottom half of the middle third, you know. But that's just a gross generalization. But we'll see. They'll start paying attention the last week or two, and some of them will vote, some of them won't. You know, I think in a perfect world we probably shouldn't count them because, you know, if you don't pay attention, I don't really care if you vote. But, anyway, I'd rather just people who read newspapers vote.

But, anyway, this has been great fun. I have to tell you, I've done these things for years and years and years, and the last couple of years the quality of the questions is significantly better than they were five, six, eight years ago. I mean, I don't know what kind of -- I don't know what kind of people your papers or your news organizations used to send here -- (laughter) -- but the caliber is a hell of a lot higher than it used to be, I'll give you that. It's been very good questions and a lot of fun from my standpoint. Thank you all very much.

(Applause.)

MR. DENIG: Charlie, thank you very much.