A surprisingly well-thought out memo from Zogby:
http://www.zogby.com/news/051004.html
Excerpt:
I have made a career of taking bungee jumps in my election calls. Sometimes I haven't had a helmet and I have gotten a little scratched. But here is my jump for 2004: John Kerry will win the election.
Have you recovered from the shock? Is this guy nuts? Kerry's performance of late has hardly been inspiring and polls show that most Americans have no sense of where he really stands on the key issues that matter most to them. Regardless, I still think that he will win. And if he doesn't, it will be because he blew it.
Zogby gives four reasons: 1. Kerry's got a bigger lead where it counts. 2. There are very few undecided voters. 3. The economy is still the top issue. 4. Kerry is a good closer.
While it's not genius-level analysis, it does seem to ring true.
Which brings me to an interesting question: are we now past the "tipping point"? Was Abu Ghraib the straw that broke the camel's back, and we're now looking at a death spiral for Bush? It does seem to me that with all of the pundits turning, the media howling for blood, the numbers slowly ticking over, that there's something different in the air this week that wasn't there last week.
I wouldn't say that Abu Ghraib is the one thing that costs Bush this election, but it may be that we look back and say that early May was the time when Kerry began to have the aura of inevitability.