12:10 P.M. EDT
Real Audio of Briefing
MR. DENIG: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center. We are very pleased today, as part of our series of briefings on Elections 2004, to be able to welcome back to our podium such a well known expert as Curtis Gans, the Director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
You have seen, no doubt, the press reports of increased voter registration this year and you have heard from this podium the comment of a number of our analysts that the key thing now is the turnout. So today we have Curtis Gans, who will talk about both the upsurge in the registrations and the question of the turnout on Election Day itself.
After Mr. Gans' opening statement, we'll be glad to take your questions.
Curtis.
MR. GANS: I am normally the Chicken Little of the turnout business. I have been tracking what has been essentially low and declining turnout in America and I am usually coming to podiums like this and predicting ever lower turnout because we are now 139th out of 172 democracies in the world in our level of voter turnout, and we've had a 20 percent decline nationally, 25 percent outside the South and in every demographic group except people over 65.
I am not going to talk about registration. I don't have enough figures to go to look at that issue clearly. I will in the midweek, and I'll get the Foreign Press Center our report on that when it's available [so they can put it up on their website]. But we only have six or seven states with final official numbers in, and I don't want to comment on it until I've got a representative group of states and a representative group of inactive lists to do corrections on the gross registration figures.
To give you one example of a state that we now have in, Alaska, they have had a 33 percent drop in registration, all the way from one and a third -- 133 percent beyond the eligible voting population, all the way down to 100 percent of the eligible voting population. It is obviously a phony figure.
I will talk about turnout because I am not Chicken Little this time around. We had a turnout in 2000 of about 106 million people and at a rate of 54 percent of the eligible citizens in our society. My belief is that we will have a turnout rate of 58 to 60 percent, or 118 to 121 million people, which is an increase of 12 to 15 million people over what we had in 2000 and an increase of 8 million more than our eligible population growth.
It is, to my mind, a temporary increase. To make it clear how I arrived at that set of figures, I'm looking at voter interest in the polls, which is comparable to 1992, when we had a 58 percent turnout. I'm looking at viewership of debates, which is only slightly lower than it was in '92, even though Fox TV did not broadcast a couple of the debates this year. We also have a level of intensity in this election that I have not seen in our politics since 1968 and the war in Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson. And I think all those factors will contribute to a higher turnout. If we go over 58.1 percent, we're at the highest since 1968.
Beyond a certain point, the increments -- and I think there will be increases in almost every demographic group, although the increases where you already have quite high turnout, like amongst the people over 65, probably will be lesser than for people below that age group.
And there's one group that I think will actually have a decline in turnout, which is moderate Republicans. Moderate Republicans see George Bush as too extreme, particularly on fiscal matters and a little bit on Iraq. They are very deeply concerned about fiscal responsibility and the debt. Some of them will hold their noses and vote for Bush, some of them can bring themselves to vote for John Kerry, but many of them will go to the polls and vote for senator and governor but blank for president, and I think that's going to happen.
Beyond a certain increment in turnout, the increase in turnout benefits Kerry. The Republicans can look to potential increases amongst the 4 million Evangelical fundamentalists that Karl Rove has targeted. They can look to increases in the military vote and perhaps in the rural vote as helping them. Almost every other demographic group that might increase their turnout is likely to help the Democrats. So that if turnout is 112 million, the Republicans are likely to benefit. If turnout is 118 million, the Democrats are likely to benefit.
The other thing I can say as an opening statement is that the turnout increase is likely to be temporary. This is not a permanent reversal of the turnout trend in the United States. We had one significant previous bump up in turnout, which was in 1992, and by 1996 turnout was lower than it had been in 1988.
And the reasons for that is that the turnout problem is deeply rooted in longer term social issues. We've had, through presidential statements beginning in 1967, "I am not going to send American boys to do what Asian boys are supposed to do." "I am not a crook." That's Richard Nixon. "I did not know anything about Iran-Contra." "Read my lips, no new taxes." "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." And, "We are in imminent danger of weapons of mass destruction." We have a lower level of trust in our leadership than perhaps at any time, surely at any time in my lifetime, and I'm 67, and probably ever. That earned lower level of trust has afflicted the media insofar as we get a much more cynical coverage of our politics than we used to get.
We've had shocks to our political system -- Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, impeachment, Iraq -- and particularly with respect to Vietnam, which the public turned against in '68 and continued until '74 to the tune of 30,000 additional American lives and the destruction of the promise of a great society. We've raised the question of responsiveness, which continues to be raised by gridlock on major issues.
We have the fragmenting and atomization of American society physically through things like suburbanization and the interstate highway system, the strip mall and abandonment of family farms, all the things that have undermined community. We have it politically through single-issue and identity politics. We have it most profoundly through the changes in our media, beginning with television, which likes to say it brings the world community into your living room, but what it does most profoundly to our society is it brings our citizens into our living room, you know, atomizing our society, making people spectators and consumers rather than participants and stockholders. It wastes an enormous amount of the time. The average person supposedly watches seven hours a day. If they work eight hours a day, sleep eight hours a day, and eat and commute an hour and a half, that doesn't give you a lot of time for participation.
We have the fragmenting of our information through things like cable and satellite, which brings you wonderful things like CNN and C-SPAN but gives you 220 channels, 180 of which you can watch all day, every day, without getting any intersection with politics and public affairs, and fragments our information base, to which you add the Internet and 5 million websites, all self-selecting, in which politics and public affairs is not the website of choice – people instead go to commerce, pornography, entertainment, music.
We have had a decline in the quality of education, particularly in urban America, where people like myself, wanting the best education for my child, have gone to the suburbs and send their kids to private school, eroding the base of urban education. Where we had it in places like California, where Proposition 13 limited the amount of money that went to the California school system and it essentially took one of the best school systems in the country and made it one of the worst.
We have a decline in civic education, a decline in newspaper reading amongst the young -- only 29 percent read newspapers at all -- and we no longer study, debate and test on current events. We've had a weakening of the media and training institutions for the young -- student government, student newspapers, debating club. The majority of young people are now growing up in households, both of whose parents don't vote and a large majority of whom don't discuss politics.
We have at this point no shared national goals, so that we are subjects of the centrifugal forces of intense interest. We've had a weakening of our integrating institutions, the churches -- except for the fundamentalist churches -- the unions, the schools and the political parties, political parties which used to have grassroots sinew and separate the wheat from the chaff of the issue-group advocacy, no longer do that; they serve as money-raisers for the payment of consultants.
We have a party system right now that's misaligned, with the Republican Party to the right of the American center, and a Democratic Party without a durable message aiming at the middle class without aiming at people below the middle class. We have the abdication, particularly of broadcast television, in the coverage of politics, which we saw this year in three hours of convention coverage. And I could list other examples. We have the way we conduct our campaigns in 30-second attack ads, which, when you don't have the emotional subtext that we have in this election, the presses turn out by creating doubts among weak partisans of the opposition and undecideds, and when it's reciprocal it casts a pall over the entire political enterprise.
We have a lack of anticipatory mechanisms in government. I don't know of anybody who was in a 30-minute traffic jam going to work 10 years ago who is not in a 40-minute traffic jam now, and it doesn't matter who gets elected.
In other words, there are powerful and long-term reasons why we've had a decline in turnout, and that isn't going to get reversed by this election. George Bush is a lightning rod, so he is likely on both sides to generate sufficient passion to boost turnout substantially in this election, but it's not likely to be durable.
I'll yield to questions.
MR. DENIG: Let me remind you to please use the microphone, identify yourself and your news organization. We'll start with Mexico.
QUESTION: Jose Cerreno with El Universal of Mexico. This is a double question, if I may.
What is the impact of immigration, both the new immigrants registered to vote and the internal migration in the United States? Have you been able to measure the impact of those movements?
MR. GANS: In terms of accurate measurements, no. Okay? You know, our largest in-migration is from south of the border and from your country. That tends to be a Democratic vote, by 60-some-odd [percent] to high 30s, but it's not uniform. Second generation Mexican-Americans who are in the entrepreneurial class, small business people, tend to vote Republican, but to my mind, it is likely, on that issue, that Texas, which went from a solidly Democratic state to a solidly Republican state, will swing somewhat back over the next couple of decades, just because the population is changing.
Now, are you talking about migration of the foreign-born population?
QUESTION: (Inaudible) population, meaning new borders, from new migrants; and (b) the internal migration from states to other states.
MR. GANS: But you're talking about the internal migration of the foreign-born, correct?
QUESTION: Oh, no, the internal migration of [various segments of] the American population, meaning snowbirds, meaning the retirees, et cetera.
MR. GANS: Well, to give an example, the senatorial race in South Carolina is competitive largely because of both Latino in-migration from other states and people coming from the Midwest. It's one state I know something about because a reporter was doing some work on it. There are demographic changes that are occurring, through what you would call mobility. It's been written about how Florida is not necessarily only going to be dominated by the Latino vote by first generation Cubans, that there are other elements in the state.
So, you know, the answer is yes, but it is unquantifiable at this point.
QUESTION: Ron Baygents, Kuwait News Agency.
I was watching this morning Ed Gillespie and Terry McAuliffe appeared together again and made some interesting statements, one, in particular, Gillespie said that the only way Kerry can win the election is because they're dispatching 10,000 lawyers to all the battleground states to monitor the polls and that can then sue over every question about how the voting is handled, and then of course McAuliffe says, no, we'll win it outright because of high turnout.
I just kind of wanted to, since this came up this morning, especially the first thing, what kind of -- how do you envision -- has there been any instance where we've had this kind of situation with lawyers monitoring polling stations, and what kind of impact will that have on voters as they go to vote and are facing this kind of a situation?
MR. GANS: Let's start with the first. You know, a lot of this is playing out because of Florida in 2000 and to some extent New Mexico in 2000. I am praying that we have a clear victor on election night. I don't care who because, given the current climate and things you said, we could have an election that would make Florida in 2000 look like a picnic, because we could have litigation in several states over enormous amounts of issues.
We are going to have Republican monitors of the bona fides of the people who are coming to the polls -- you know, there was a Times story or a Post story on marshalling monitors. We're going to have Democratic monitors on everything from provisional ballots to vote counting to whether those monitors for the Republicans are intimidating voters. This could be the most litigious election in American history. I don't think it will affect people's will to vote, which is essentially to say that in '92, the other year of increased turnout, people waited two hours in the rain in Georgia in order to vote, that the motivation in this election is so high that to the extent that people can physically do it, they're going to vote. And I just don't think that what's going on, either legally or intrusive seeking of credentials, is going to substantially reduce the vote count.
QUESTION: Jyri Raivio, newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, Finland. Why does high turnout favor Democrats?
MR. GANS: In this election it favors Democrats because, as I said initially, I only think that there are about 5 to 6 million incremental votes for the Republicans over what they had in 2000. Those are the Evangelical fundamentalists that Karl Rove was targeting, increases in the military vote and some increases in the rural vote. But if you look at polls that have been taken over the last week and a half, almost every poll shows as much as a 14 to 18 percent gap for Kerry under those people who are "new voters," which means that the other demographic groups, most notably those people under 30, but other groups are [also] going to benefit Kerry in terms of higher turnout. I'm reading my tea leaves and saying that's why I think turnout is going to be. You know, I've been wrong before and I'll probably be wrong again, but I don't think so on in this election.
QUESTION: Hi, my name is Ashad Mahmoud and I represent a major newspaper in Bangladesh.
And please help me understand, I'm completely new here, today is my first day with the Foreign Press Center, and I'm trying to understand why the turnout is low, although you explained briefly that people do not trust their presidents anymore because --
MR. GANS: No, I gave a whole list of things.
QUESTION: Yes. One of them that struck me, and in my country the people are not that educated, the last -- in the last election the turnout was 76 percent. And in a country where most people are educated at least, and they don't care to vote, could you please put things in perspective for me so that I can understand?
MR. GANS: Well, what I think I did, and I think you should get the videotape of this --
QUESTION: Yeah, I --
MR. GANS: I mean, it's a whole group of things -- trust, cynicism, fragmentation, atomization, responsiveness, decline in education, no family training, no study, weakening of our integrating institutions, the way we conduct our campaigns, the way the media covers our campaigns, the lack of media coverage -- they all affect. You have a young democracy. You know, when we were young, we had very high turnout.
QUESTION: Just one more thing. How is it going to affect the -- if there is a high turnout if it is going to affect the electoral numbers?
MR. GANS: Well, I've sort of suggested, that if it's a really high turnout it will help Kerry. Now, if it's the 58 to 60 percent turnout that I suggested, it will help Kerry.
By the way, that doesn't mean he'll win. If the gap in the polls, in people's preferences by next Tuesday is 3 to 5 percentage points, the turnout may not be determinative at all. But if it's like it is now, it could be.
QUESTION: I'm Hiro Aida with Japan's Kyodo News. If you are going to have this high turnout of 58 or 60 percent, in which particular demographic group or groups are you going to see the highest growth rate of turnout?
MR. GANS: The highest growth rate will be people 30 and under.
QUESTION: Are there any other particular groups which comes next, or, you know, could you just --
MR. GANS: I don't know. But I do know that we're likely to get a 10 to 20 percent surge in people 30 and under.
QUESTION: Women? Would that be almost the same rate, do you think?
MR. GANS: Probably the same rate, maybe slightly higher than men.
QUESTION: Olga Bakova, Slovak Radio. I would like to ask you about Ralph Nader factor. Many people say that he's like a déjà vu from 2000.
MR. GANS: Well, it's not, in one respect. I would be shocked if he got anything near one-third of the votes that he got in 2000. Most people recognize, on one hand that this is an ego trip, and on the other hand that because of the deep emotional intensity surrounding George Bush, a lot of people who might under other circumstances cast a protest vote for Nader aren't going to do so this year. Now, if the results in a state between Bush and Kerry are half a percentage point difference, Nader could affect the results in that state.
QUESTION: So I'll ask you if he can do any harm like he did four years ago?
MR. GANS: Well, are you a Kerry fan or a Bush fan? (Laughter.) I mean, is that harm or help?
QUESTION: No, I don't know. Yeah.
MR. GANS: The answer is, it is possible in a closely contested state where he gets a half a percentage point and the difference between the two [major candidates] is a half a percentage point [that he could make a difference].
QUESTION: Would you be willing to touch on some of the battleground states, like, say, do you have any states in mind where this thing that you just described would mostly likely -- you don't want to go there?
MR. GANS: I don't want to go there.
QUESTION: All right.
QUESTION: Michael Backfisch, Germany's business daily Handelsblatt.
How many undecided voters are left? How many percentage points?
MR. GANS: Well, the --
QUESTION: Yeah, actually, it's a triple, but very brief. And where do you think they will finally go?
Secondly, what's more important -- mobilization or the swing voters?
And thirdly, you mentioned already you expect the highest growth rate of turnout among the voters under 30. What do you think, in which direction will they go? Because they were not covered in the polls, at least not the ones who use exclusively cell phones.
MR. GANS: The first -- let's repeat them one at a time.
QUESTION: The question is the undecided voters, in percentage points how many are left and where do they go?
MR. GANS: Well, I believe that the undecided voters are those who say they're undecided and weak partisans of both sides, so I would essentially say that probably 12 percent of the vote is up for grabs, between 12 and 15. And it's too early to tell where they'll go.
QUESTION: 50/50 Bush/Kerry or --
MR. GANS: No. What an undecided voter is in this election, and you see it in the polls, which is essentially, they believe that the country is on the wrong track, they have low approval ratings for Bush on the economy and Iraq. On the other hand, they haven't been yet convinced that Kerry is up to the job, and that's where those people are. It's not that they have weak opinions. They have strong opinions. But they have strong conflicting opinions and they'll make a decision down the road.
Okay, next.
QUESTION: Brief one. What's more important, mobilization or swing voters?
MR. GANS: They're both important. I mean, there is no constituency that stands out. You want to maximize your constituency and you want to augment it by the swing voters that you can get. I mean, I get phone calls, people asking me, "Can the overseas vote make a difference? Can the youth vote make a difference? Can this vote make a difference?"
Well, you know, it depends on how it cuts compared to what it was in 2000. If Black turnout, for instance, is higher but Bush gets a larger percentage of it, it may neutralize that factor. If the overseas vote votes strongly for Bush or Kerry, then it can be a determining factor. But if it ends up 50/50, it's not a determining factor no matter how much more turnout you've got.
That's why the young people vote -- you know, there is a study that came out last week from Harvard University and essentially the young people vote is at this point 13 points for Kerry.
QUESTION: (Off mike.)
MR. GANS: No.
QUESTION: (Off mike.) (Laughter.)
MR. GANS: Well, it depends on how -- I mean, there is a high intent to turnout, but young people have always said they would turn out. I happen to think that this year they will, but they could again disappoint. Turnout for 18 to 24 year-olds in 2000 was 33 percent. Now, it should be said that for college young people it was about 40 percent. I think college young people turnout will be 50 percent or over this time around.
QUESTION: Yes, hi. Alex Alexandrov from Russian news agency TASS. We've heard a lot about the Evangelical Christians and the fact that 4 million of them stayed home in the last election. Can you comment as to how important this voting block is to George Bush's reelection, and does high turnout among the Christian vote mean a Bush victory?
MR. GANS: Well, the first is very, very, very important to Bush because of the way Bush has conducted his presidency and conducted his campaign. And the answer on the other is no. You know, it really depends on how high the turnout is. Four million -- you know, I'm predicting a total increase of 12.5 to 15 million voters; 4 million is only one-third of that, not half or more.
QUESTION: Yes, good afternoon, sir. My name is Xingfu Zhu from Shanghai Wenhui daily. Sorry for being late, so I did not catch the first half.
If, let's say, leaving the undecided votes or the high turnout, so if the election were held tomorrow, how many electoral votes will go to George W. [Bush] and how many will go to John Kerry?
MR. GANS: I don't have any idea. (Laughter.) And I'm not going to get into that.
QUESTION: Patrick Jarreau, the French daily Le Monde. So what is the potential for fraud in the process of registration, the early voting, the absentee ballot?
MR. GANS: We have two things. Historically, the Democrats have wanted to increase the vote and occasionally have registered people who have either died or are fictitious or are aliens. Now, a few years ago, we had a race between Congressman Bob Dornan and Loretta Sanchez, which was reviewed, and it was found that a few hundred aliens had voted; not enough to change the results, which were upheld. This year, Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy are registered in Ohio.
So on the Democratic side, you tend to have some elements of illegitimate increase in the registration roll. You also have, on both sides, the potential for official election fraud. When I was running Eugene McCarthy's '68 campaign in Indiana, there were these people called "seers," who, for a given amount of money before the election, could tell you exactly the numbers which would appear on the back of their voting machines on election night.
You have on the other side what I believe is voter suppression and intimidation. You have the case that now exists that forced the resignation of the Republican New England coordinator in which the Democratic phones were jammed for their registration and get-out-the-vote activities in New Hampshire. You have this company called Sproul, which has been operating in a number of states on behalf of the Republican Party, theoretically to conduct registration campaigns broadly, but giving instructions to its people to only register Republican voters, and -- it is alleged and I think it will be proved – to discard Democratic registrations that they have received.
You have different interpretations on a partisan basis of the provisional voting opportunities under the Help America Vote Act. You have had differentials on acceptances, registration. In Florida, they have a form which on the top asks you to check if you're a citizen, or on the bottom, asks you for an affidavit if you're a citizen. If you didn't check the top, your registration was disqualified, and three-quarters of those who were disqualified were African-Americans.
So we have the potential on both sides to have a very litigious election. Does that answer your question?
QUESTION: I was wondering, beyond the litigation, what is the percentage of deliberate fraud that could be expected?
MR. GANS: Nobody can quantify. You know, in connection with some work that I did as a part of a commission I created with the chairmen of both major political parties that eventually led to the Motor-Voter registration law, I looked at the issue of fraud, of all types, in terms of what appeared in the major newspapers in each state in the country over a period of six years. And there were 91 cases that were concentrated in a given number of states, which is to say it's not the hugest problem in the world, but in this election, because of what people perceive the stakes are, on both sides I think we're going to have more problems in this election, which is why I'm hoping for a higher turnout. A decisive result is what I'm hoping for.
QUESTION: Voice of America. Mr. Gans, I wanted to follow up on that. So would you, in your opinion, say that because of the legitimate problems and concerns about fraud, that both parties’ sending thousands of election monitors is justified? Or would you say it's just a ploy to intimidate voters?
And the second thing I wanted to ask is, on provisional ballots, can you talk a little bit about the possibilities for fraud? Can you elaborate a little bit more? Thanks.
MR. GANS: I think the concerns that have people sending armies of litigators and others to the polls, are legitimate. I don't think it will intimidate people. I feel that this election has emotional underpinnings that will deter few people who want to vote from going out to vote. So, I'm not sure of that, but where people are concerned about Republican intimidation, I'm sure there will be Democrats with tape recorders. Where people are concerned about false names, I'm sure there will be Republicans scrutinizing names. But I think people will vote.
Now, on provisional balloting, I don't see the possibility of fraud, which is essentially to say that, you're voting a provisional ballot, which means that your bona fides have to be checked before that ballot is counted, to determine whether you are entitled to vote.
On the other hand, I am now concerned about the narrowness of the interpretation of who can get a provisional ballot. If you can only go to what is your polling place, which you may not know, and that's the only time you can get a provisional ballot, I think that's wrong. As far as I'm concerned, you ought to be able to get a provisional ballot for statewide office, which would be president and then governor or senator, any place in the state, because you are still a citizen in the state. You shouldn't be able to vote for the local offices unless you're in the right place, but you should be able to vote for the major offices. The narrowest interpretation, I think, is harmful to participation and to getting everybody who wants to vote have their vote counted.
QUESTION: Sawaki of Tokyo Shimbun. Could you tell us how you came to the conclusion that the turnout would be somewhere between 58 and 60 percent? And how come you are so sure that the new voters in young generation will actually come to the polling stations, when the conventional wisdom is said to be that many of them don't?
MR. GANS: I said I came to the conclusion in terms of the level of turnout based on three things: one, the voter interest figures in reputable polls rival 1992; '92 turnout was 58 percent. The viewership of debates was slightly lower than '92, but we had less coverage of the debates this year because Fox TV didn't cover at least two of them. And the third is the intensity level in this election, which is the highest at least since 1968, in my recollection.
As far as the young people are concerned, young people will not vote at the same rate as old people in this election, but because I think they are also motivated by the lightning rod called George Bush, they will vote at a substantially higher rate than they did in 2000 or in the previous election.
So I don't, I mean, I don't know that, but I see -- I see that in the polls, too.
QUESTION: My name is Wada. I am with Japan's Mainichi newspaper. If a confusion greater than that in Florida in 2000 actually takes place, do you think that will lead to a rise of serious debate on the need to change, for example, the Electoral College system, or the winner-takes-all system?
MR. GANS: I'm hoping that the winner-take-all system gets changed. I don't think we want, in perpetuity, to have campaigns in 18 states and not in 32 states and the District of Columbia. I'm hoping we will explore the one or two ways that we can make our campaigns national, in terms of going to as many states as possible, without going to direct elections.
What will trigger that? I think there's going to be a serious look at the Electoral College after this election, probably because we've had two successive elections with exactly the same profile. The two remedies are either to adopt what Maine and Nebraska have, or to adopt what is being considered in Colorado -- which won't pass this year, but is a serious attempt to deal with the Electoral College distortion.
QUESTION: El Universal from Mexico again. I wonder, this year we have been subject to a very steady diet of Red and Blue states and the importance of the undecided states. I wonder if this increase in the number of voters, or possible voters, has been also even in all the country, or has been bigger in some states than others? And if you have any kind of information or any kind of hint of how these new registered voters have fared in terms of the so-called battleground states?
MR. GANS: I told you, I wasn't going to touch registration, so I'm not going to touch registration. But based on history, the increase in voting will be greater in battleground states than in non-battleground states. That was true by a couple of percentage points in 2000.
QUESTION: You mentioned that there are some moderate Republicans who would maybe not vote for Bush for the fiscal reason or whatever. Is there some group among Democrats who would not vote for Kerry for some reason, or they are really steady?
MR. GANS: I have not heard a Democrat, other than Zell Miller -- (laughter) -- who is not going to vote for Kerry, not necessarily because they love Kerry but because they hate Bush.
MR. DENIG: One last very quick one.
QUESTION: Are the polls this time less reliable than they have been previously? And can we expect a result, some kind of result, on November the 2nd?
MR. GANS: The answer is I don't know, because I don't know what their screening questions are and what their weighting is. I don't know what their turnout assumptions are, and I don't know what their demographic subgroup turnout assumptions. You're going to have to ask the pollsters.
At this point, from my viewpoint, I tend to trust the registered voter polls more than the likely voter polls, because the likely voter polls essentially look at past history, and we've got a lot of people who are going to vote for the first time.
MR. DENIG: Thank you very much, Mr. Gans. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
