Where Do the Candidates Stand in the Polls?
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Once again, as we mentioned at the top of this hour, the latest CNN/"USA Today"/Gallup tracking poll does show George Bush with a solid lead over Al Gore: that lead maintaining now for five straight days. For more on what this may mean, we turn to the editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, Frank Newport, live this morning again in Princeton. Hey, Frank, good morning.</s>FRANK NEWPORT, EDITOR IN CHIEF, GALLUP POLL: Good morning, Bill. Let's look at a little long-term perspective. There's no question about it, that since the debates George W. Bush, generally speaking, when we aggregate our data, has been ahead of Al Gore: sometimes by not much, and it's still not a huge lead, but nevertheless George Bush generally has been ahead. We've taken it all the way back there to the pre-debate era -- a long time now, the end of September -- Gore was ahead slightly, and then you can see there were very close together. Each one of these data points represents about 1,800 interviews, and in fact, this last data point down here is over 2,000 likely voters included in this six- day average. And as you see, you can see George Bush maintaining a slight lead over Al Gore. Now, these are likely voters that we're talking about. I think it's always useful to talk about the importance of turnout. If we just isolate registered voters, you can see it's really too close to call. Bush just has a two-point lead in that point. What we're talking about here is likely voters: That is, not all registered voters vote. We all know that. Only about half, in fact, of the voting-age population votes. So when we make our estimate of the most likely voters, Gore actually gains a few points. That's not unusual. The Republican usually does have more of his supporters coming out. But it does isolate the importance of turnout for both sides, and that's a lot of what they're doing this week just to try to get their people to come out to the polls. That could make the difference. A couple of interesting facts in the election, a curvilinear pattern in terms of education. Look at this: Very interestingly, Gore is tied among that big, big group of Americans who just have high- school educations or less, typical for a Democrat. But Al Gore also wins among Americans with graduate degrees: law degrees, Ph.D.s and so forth. It's George W. Bush who does better with the people with at least some college or just a college degree. One other point, George W. Bush is winning based on the conservative vote. No question about. The biggest group of Americans call themselves conservatives. Bush is getting 74 percent of their vote. Actually, among those who call themselves moderates, Al Gore is ahead, and of course, Gore is ahead of liberals. The reason all this averages out to that slight lead for George W. Bush at this point, we can show you is, there are a lot of people who call themselves conservative. Like 43% call themselves conservative. About 43 percent call themselves conservative, and that huge lead he has there offsets Gore's lead among moderates and also Gore's strong lead among that smaller sliver of people who call themselves liberals. So, that's where the public stands at this point. We're monitoring it day by day. Back to you, Bill.</s>HEMMER: Indeed we are, Frank. OK, Frank, thank you very much.