So, the media is beating the drum that all of the latest polls spell trouble for Kerry and his candidacy must be doomed, blahblahblah.

Remember when, you know, Kerry had been consistently up in the polls for months? Remember how Bush's campaign people were badgered about how much in trouble their candidate was?

What, you don't remember that? You don't recall that solid two months of doomsday rhetoric about the upcoming demise of an unpopular incumbent president [sic]?

No, I don't either. Funny.

I'd like to take this moment, though, to say what I believe is going to happen in the months to come. Kerry is down now, just barely holding on to a lead (hold that thought a moment: the challenger is holding on to a lead against a White House incumbent... OK), but, as analysis shows, it's not that Bush's numbers have gone up as much as that Bush's Swift Boat Liars smear campaign has driven Kerry's numbers down.

Now, the convention may give Bush a little bit of an actual bounce, a positive lift in his numbers, but I don't expect it to be very big bounce, due both to structural matters (the aroused nature of each candidate's base and the relatively small percentage of undecideds) and to the very real deficiencies of the administration's policies and track record. Nor will Bush's post-convention bounce last long -- extrapolating from Pollkatz' graph of Bush approval scores, I expect it to evaporate away fairly quickly. After that, Bush falls back down to about where he has been over the last two months, which is to say buoyed up by his core support, and not much else.

Nevertheless, I do not expect there to be a precipatating "tipping point" event which sets off a cascade of enthusiasm for Kerry among the undecideds, ending up in a landslide victory. Rather, I expect the campaign to continue on in pretty much the annoying and nerve-racking way it has for a while now, roughly 50/50 (looked at grossly), but with Kerry slowly and fairly consistently gaining small measures of support and all the time incrementally eating away at the fringe of Bush's non-basic support. But even with that dynamic in place, it will not be intuitively obvious (except perhaps to people minutely in touch with the ebb and flow of the numbers) that Kerry's gains will hold in place and be sufficient for a win.

In other words, I expect things to continue to at least appear to be touch-and-go right down to the wire.

And then, on Election Day, I expect that the crisis of having to make a definitive decision about who to support will push enough undecideds over the line towards Kerry that he will win, not by a huge margin, but decisively. His popular vote totals margin will not be as substantial as his electoral vote margin, which will be sufficient to guarantee that there won't be another Florida debacle.

That's what I anticipate will happen -- and let me tell you, I'm not looking forward to the ajita it's likely to promote, or the constant specter of impending doom, the Sword of Damocles of a Bush second term. (Of course, we've avoided that in the past as well.)


Update: Since I track the electoral college daily, I should have mentioned where I think it's going to end up. Prompted by a question from Chris Bowers on MyDD, I posted my prediction: Kerry takes all the Gore states plus New Hampshire, Ohio, West Virginia and Florida, for a total of 316 electoral votes (with 270 needed to win). Bush ends up with 222. In the popular vote I've less of an idea, except to say that Kerry will win in the popular vote, he will not be a minority president.