Gore losing ground to Bush

Democratic presidential hopeful Vice President Al Gore has lost considerable ground to GOP presidential rival George W. Bush since the Democratic National Convention in August, a series of new polls indicate.

According to today’s

Portrait of America’s Presidential Tracking Poll, Bush leads Gore in the popular vote 42.0 percent to 40.8 percent. Statistically, POA has the race a dead heat.

In the third-party races, POA said Green Party nominee Ralph Nader still leads the pack with 3.0 percent, followed by Reform nominee Patrick J. Buchanan with 1.5 percent. Meanwhile, Libertarian Harry Browne has 0.7 percent; the Constitution Party’s Howard Phillips and independent John Hagelin both have 0.2 percent.

Portrait of America polled 2,250 likely voters in a telephone survey Sept. 21-23. The margin of sampling error is +/- 2 percentage points, with a 95 percent level of confidence.

In

Voter.com’s Battleground 2000 Poll on Friday, Bush led Gore 43 percent to 38 percent in one of the widest polling margins since the end of the DNC convention.

In the third parties, 3 percent cast a ballot for Nader and 1 percent for Buchanan, with 14 percent still undecided.

The poll has a 3.1 percent margin of error. The survey was based on a rolling sample of 1,000 likely voters and is part of a series of tracking polls released each weekday between now and Election Day. The poll was conducted by Democratic pollster Celinda Lake of Lake, Snell, Perry, & Associates and Republican pollster Ed Goeas of the Tarrance Group.

In a third poll taken by CNN/USA Today/Gallup Sept. 21-23, Bush held a slight statistical lead over Gore by 47 to 46 percent. For the first time since Labor Day, it appears that Bush has made significant gains at Gore’s expense with the recent revelations of the inaccurate statements Gore has made during the last few weeks, analysts said.

The poll sampled 693 likely voters with a sampling error of +/- 6 percentage points.

On the campaign trail today, Bush officials said the Texas governor will again visit California during campaign stops, refusing to concede the state to Democrats despite predictions the Texas governor has no chance to win the state.

California, with 54 electoral votes – the most of any state in the union – contains a fifth of the 270 electoral votes a candidate needs to win the Oval Office Nov. 7.

Before traveling back to California, Bush aides said the governor plans to visit Oregon and Wyoming, two more states where the race is close.

While in California, the Bush campaign said the GOP nominee will discuss education, charging the Clinton-Gore administration with allowing an “education recession” to develop in the state. During the campaign, Bush has touted a smaller federal role in education, while Gore seeks to expand Washington’s role.

For his part, Gore spent most of the weekend and early morning today defending the administration’s release of 30 million barrels of oil from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve, though last February the vice president decried the idea as a bad move.

Saying he would not side with the “apologists” for big oil companies, Gore told NBC’s “Today” show the administration “would not sit around and do nothing” while consumers had to pay “outrageously high” gas and oil prices.

Asked if the release would diminish the nation’s overall emergency stocks, Gore said the release would not deplete reserves. He characterized the release as “swaps” of oil, which would be “replenished” by oil companies eventually.

Critics said the deal with oil companies was to swap oil when prices fell to a more reasonable level – a level that may or may not be achieved anytime soon. Though initially the release has caused oil prices to fall from about $37 a barrel on Friday to an opening today on the markets of about $32, analysts said it would be a short-term gain because U.S. consumers would use the amount released by the administration in just a few days.

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