Page 3 — Bush Narrowly Leads in Electoral College

America is headed for another tight presidential election, with a real possibility that Democratic candidate John Kerry could win the popular vote while Republican President George Bush wins the Electoral College, and thus four more years in the Oval Office.

HUMAN EVENTS surveyed the most recently published statewide polls pitting Bush against Kerry. We discovered 42 states where polls tested the match-up. Bush led in 25, with 264 electoral votes. Kerry led in 16, with 236 electoral votes. New Hampshire (4 electoral votes) was an exact tie.

Of the eight states where no poll was published, we assume that five with a total of 20 electoral votes (Alaska, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming) will go to Bush, and three with a total of 11 electoral votes (Delaware, Hawaii and Rhode Island) will go to Kerry. We also assume Kerry will win the District of Columbia's 3 electoral votes.

All the polls cited below have margins-of-error, of course, some equaling or exceeding 5 percentage points. Some were conducted two or three months ago. But, granting our predictions for un-polled states, and assuming the surveys gathered here are accurate indicators of how each polled state would vote, an election held today would yield a 284-to-250 Electoral College victory for Bush.

Bush would pick up two states (Wisconsin and New Mexico) that he lost to Gore in 2000. Kerry would pick up only one state (West Virginia) that Bush won.

Kerry, however, holds large leads in some of the most populous states (52% to 39% in Illinois, 51% to 32% in New York, 54% to 32% in Massachusetts, 45% to 36% in California) and this conceivably could tilt the popular vote to him.

Third-party candidate Ralph Nader could also hurt Kerry just as he hurt Gore. In 18 of the polls cited below (see asterisks), respondents were given the option of supporting Nader as well as Bush or Kerry (for space reasons we omitted Nader's numbers). In 11 of those states, Bush leads.

ALABAMA