A Look Back At 2000 - Introduction

There has been a lot of talk about the stability of the poll numbers in this year’s presidential election due to the polarized electorate, but as we’ve seen in the last two months, there is room for movement. From mid-May when John Kerry announced John Edwards as his running mate through late July when the Democrats held a successful if lowkey convention, Kerry turned a stubbornly tied race into a solid three point lead. Then a perfect storm seemed to develop for Bush wherein the media obsessed over the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads, which took up a couple weeks in August leading up to an extremely strong convention performance, after which Bush took the lead by anywhere from 3-10 points. It’s become clear that, even in this tight election, events both unforseen and premeditated can move the numbers a little bit any which way and these ultimately prove to be the determining factors of this race.

So I wanted to find out, what were the determining factors 4 years ago? Did the candidates get bounces from their conventions? From their VP picks? Were the debates important? And from this information, what can we deduce might happen over the next month and a half? Luckily we have our very own polling guru who painstakingly tracked every poll in 2000 and has kept them in a massive spreadsheet. So over the next week, look for our very own look back at 2000.