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Analysis: Polls confirm Kerry's 'Big Mo'

By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 (UPI) -- The first October Surprise is in and it belongs to John Kerry: He has grabbed the momentum of the presidential campaign from President George W. Bush.

The first batch of polls taken right after the first presidential debate last Thursday shows Kerry on the rebound and perceived by significant majorities in the population as the clear winner in that contest. Most polls still put Bush in the lead, but by significantly reduced margins.

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The latest New York Times/CBS poll, announced Tuesday, showed the two candidates tied at 47-percent support. This was a dramatic success for Kerry, who last month trailed Bush 41 percent to 50 percent in a similar three-way race with independent candidate Ralph Nader.

Newsweek, which had shown Kerry trailing Bush in three-quarters of the key battleground states through August and September, proclaimed the senator from Massachusetts "off the ropes" and the clear winner of the first debate in its latest Oct. 16 cover.

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And Newsweek in its first post-debate poll even put Kerry in the lead nationwide by 47 percent to 45 percent for Bush, again in a three-way race with Nader. The poll was conducted for Newsweek by Princeton Survey Research Associates among 1,013 registered voters contacted between Sept. 30 and Oct. 2 by telephone, and its margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Other polls tell a similar story. The latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll taken Friday through Sunday among 934 people still gives Bush the lead, but only by the wafer-thin margin of 49 percent over 47 percent with Nader down to 1 percent.

Other polls show better news for the president. A Pew Research Center poll of 1,002 registered voters also taken by telephone Friday through Sunday put the president ahead by the decisive margin of 7 points, 48 percent to 41 percent. And an ABC News tracking poll still put Bush 5 points in the lead, 50 percent to 45 percent. The Pew and Gallup polls had a plus or minus 4-point margin of error, and the ABC News poll a 3-point margin.

It is certainly true that one perceived debate victory cannot by itself undo Kerry's disastrous slump in August at the hands of the Republican attack machine or the many miscalculations, chaotic organization and flubbed opportunities he has suffered in this campaign so far. Significantly, most of the same polls that showed Kerry the perceived victor in his Thursday debate with the president also showed him still badly trailing Bush in the crucial quality of being perceived as best able to defend the United States against another major terrorist attack.

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But Kerry has nevertheless reversed the momentum dramatically in his favor. The new batch of polls shows him in a virtual dead heat with the president. That is quite a turnaround since August and early September, when he seemed to be heading for a defeat of Michael Dukakis-scale proportion.

It was also a remarkable achievement to have regained so much of this ground on the basis of a presidential-debate performance.

Presidential debates have on occasions proven crucial in election races, most notably for John F. Kennedy in 1960 against Richard Nixon and for Ronald Reagan in 1980 against Jimmy Carter. On both occasions candidates trailing clearly in the polls at Labor Day as Kerry was came storming back to win the November election, in JFK's case by a hairsbreadth, in Reagan's decisively.

Even after the good news in the polls, Kerry is still carrying massive disadvantages. Polls in the crucial battleground states still show him far behind Bush in such crucial Electoral College prizes as Ohio, Wisconsin and Missouri.

Republican administrations control Ohio and Florida and have not been shy about using their clout to try and damp down the massive wave of new voter registrations that America Coming Together and other groups has been generating.

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Kerry simply must close the gap in those key states and break ahead in New Jersey if he is to have any serious prospects of triumph on Nov. 2.

But having added all these caveats, what Kerry has gained from his first debate remains impressive and could even prove decisive. Ratings indicated that no less than 55 million people in the United States -- almost as much as the population of Britain, Italy or France -- watched the first debate.

That number was a full 15 million higher than the highest rating recorded in the 2000 presidential election debates between Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore. It strongly suggests that the powerful swing towards the president over August and early September was indeed reversible as the Democrats hoped and that huge swathes of the electorate remained persuadable by either side.

Kerry made the most of those numbers, and it was the president who blinked -- many times and rapidly, in fact -- before the unrelenting gaze of the network television cameras.

What the first debate therefore did -- and what the first polling numbers have confirmed -- was to undo the conditioning that months of vastly better organized, planned and coordinated GOP advertising and attacks on Kerry's character and credibility had done.

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Kerry was able to present himself in the eyes of a huge national network audience as being credible, dignified and presidential. By contrast, Bush, who has excelled in maintaining those qualities though years of carefully planned image manipulation and scripted public appearances, appeared to far greater disadvantage than he has at any previous time in his national political career.

The president still has two more debates and just less than four weeks of campaigning with the best-funded and arguable best-organized electoral machine in U.S. political history at his beck and call to undo that image. But for the first time in months, he has lost control of the issues of the debate. And the next presidential debate Friday is going to be on domestic issues, where the administration's record is quite weak.

It is telling that Bush and his master-strategist Karl Rove chose to make the president's national-security record and determined character the central themes of their campaign. But Kerry was able to trump that ace on Sept. 30. The entire dynamic of the campaign has been transformed as a result.

The polls therefore confirm Kerry's clear victory in the first debate while also emphasizing that the race is still open, with opportunities and dangers of disastrous mistakes looming for both candidates. Both candidates still have the chance to inflict October Surprises on each other. But Kerry has reversed the momentum and stormed back into the race. That much is clear: And it is no small thing.

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