Home  |  Web Resources  |  Free Advertising

Change Your Life!

Is Gore slightly up or is it a dead heat?

News
Sports
Chat
Travel
Dhaka Today
Yellow Pages
Higher Education
Ask a Doctor
Weather
Currency Rate
Horoscope
E-Cards
B2K Poll
Comment on the Site
B2K Club

September 20, 2000 

WASHINGTON, SEPT 19 (UNB/AP) - Two new polls on the presidential race point to a highly competitive contest.

Democrat Al Gore has an edge of 5 percentage points over Republican George W. Bush in a CNN-USA Today-Gallup tracking poll while a Voter.Com Battleground survey puts them in a dead heat.

New state polls offering a glimpse at the all-important race for 270 electoral votes indicate Gore is leading in California, New Jersey and Delaware, while the two are close in Nevada and New Mexico. Gore is up 18 points in the Democratic stronghold of Hawaii, while Bush is up in conservative Virginia by 7 points.

In the national tracking polls, CNN-USA Today-Gallup put the contest at 48 percent for Gore to 43 percent for Bush, with a 4 percentage point error margin. Gore and Bush are statistically even in the Voter.Com Battleground poll, with the Republican at 41 percent and the Democrat at 39 percent, with a 3 percentage point error margin.

The CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll of 741 likely voters was conducted Sept. 15-17 while the Voter.com-Battleground poll of 1,000 likely voters was conducted Sept. 11-14. Tracking polls are rolling samples taken over three or four nights, with the oldest night's sample dropped each time a new night's sample of voters is added.

They are most valuable at tracking trends, rather than night-to-night comparisons. The CNN-USA-Today Gallup poll has shown Gore with an edge in the polls for about a week, while the Voter.com Battleground poll, conducted by Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and Republican pollster Ed Goeas, has shown the race very close.

Gore campaign spokesman Doug Hattaway offered no theory on the different polls.

	Laura Bush, wife of Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. George W. Bush, center, answers questions at a town hall meeting Monday, Sept. 18, 2000, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

Bush campaign spokesman Ari Fleischer noted the Battleground poll was among the most accurate in forecasting the election results in 1996.

In the state polls:

-Gore was ahead of Bush by 48-39 in the California poll of 1,099 likely voters conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California from Sept. 5-11. It has an error margin of 3.5 percentage points.

-Gore was ahead 47-34 in the New Jersey poll of 670 registered voters conducted for the Newark Star-Ledger by the Eagleton Institute. It has an error margin of 4 percentage points.