Maybe slight Kerry, but pretty much 50-50. The country knows both candidates, and slight majorities like neither. How Sabato and Zogby imagine everyone jumping for Kerry is beyond me.

Historically, undecided voters break 2-1 for the challenger. Most of them want the incumbent out but have unresolved doubts about whether the challenger is a serious alternative to the status quo. Usually, they decide that he is (see 1980).

However, most of these elections turn on economic issues. In an election where war and security are greater concerns, undecided voters might behave differently. If Bush is successful in raising doubts about Kerry's commitment to national security, more of the undecideds will vote for him.

President George W. Bush will declare victory when elections are announced, and a full-scale retreat will ensue, similar to the one led by tough-guy Ronald Reagan from Lebanon in 1982. Saddam Hussein will have been released and he will run for president. His claim will be that he is the only person who can restore security and who has the nuts to face down the United States. Many voters will agree with him because all the other candidates are regional, factionalist candidates, and many other voters are afraid of what might happen if Saddam wins and they supported someone else. Saddam's national pride and national security platform (sound familiar) will lead to victory, and we will be in the same position we were in two years ago.

Question #1: William Jennings Bryan was nominated three times by the Democrats and lost all three, in 1896, 1900, and 1908. Grover Cleveland was nominated three times by the Democrats (1884, 1888, and 1892), and he won the first and third of these. The question did not say that the candidate lost all three times.

The most humiliating landslide of the 20th century had to be the 1912 election. President Taft, the incumbent, carried only three states and finished third in many states behind not only Woodrow Wilson but his old boss Teddy Roosevelt, running as a third-party candidate. Roosevelt had given Taft his blessing to run in 1908, but apparently thought better of it four years later. To be soundly rejected by your own party, by your former boss, and by the whole nation must be the greatest humiliation.

Wasn't Bill Clinton booed off the stage after his 1988 nomination speech for Michael Dukakis ran way too long?

Harry Truman lived about a mile from where I live, and I think it is amusing that people from both sides try and claim him as their own. In a way it is a compliment to the memory of Truman. But really, Truman as a Republican?

Truman's domestic policy would be derided as quasi-socialist were it proposed today. It favored higher taxes on the rich, was explicitly redistributionist, and contained expansive government programs for national health care, housing, social security, etc. Truman loathed the Republicans because they catered to the affluent at the expense of the common man. The Republicans, who were and are owned and operated by big business and the wealthy, had opposed the whole of the New Deal, which Truman staked his entire political career on. The idea that he would today join today's Republican Party, which is even more in the thrall of the wealthy than it was then, is complete foolishness.

Truman's foreign policy was in the mainstream of the Democratic Party in those days, as opposed to some of the isolationists of the right. Today, he would be a moderate Democrat, middle-of-the-roader in foreign affairs.

Truman's reputation is as a straight talker, so both sides in today's debate want to claim him as their own. But he would sooner die than join the party of George W. Bush, a spoiled rich brat who is deceitful, does whatever his corporate contributors tell him to do, is entirely driven by money, and is incompetent in foreign affairs.