Bush moves up in polls

With elections less than a month away, Texas Gov. George W. Bush has overtaken Vice President Al Gore in multiple opinion polls since last week's presidential debates. A Gallup Poll, conducted Thursday to Saturday, is the most recent organization to report a Bush lead, at 49-41 percent in Bush's favor.\nA CNN/USA Today/Gallup tracking poll reports the same results, and a CNN/Time poll reported a 45-47 percent Bush lead. All three polls were conducted directly after last week's presidential and vice presidential debates. Only voter.com and Los Angeles Times polls have shown a Bush lead since August. Since September, this is the first time Gallup has shown Bush ahead in opinion polls by more than the 4 percent margin of error.\nPolitical science professor Leroy Rieselbach, who researches public opinion, said the shift in the polls might be attributed to Republican attacks on Gore's credibility after the debates, and he said Gore fudged about visiting Texas disaster sites with the director of Federal Emergency Management and other issues.\n"I would be interested in seeing the impact of the debates, especially the presidential one, on Gore's levels of trust," Rieselbach said. "One possible reason for the shift toward Bush is that people have begun to have their doubts about Gore's trustworthiness and his reliability and credibility."\nIn contrast to the Gallup poll, a politics.com reporting survey shows Gore has a "modest lead" in electoral votes, "with the potential for" 226 votes in 17 states, whereas Bush is ahead in 23 states having 205 votes. Politics.com also reports 11 states totaling 107 electoral votes still undecided. Among those undecided states is Florida, which controls 25 electoral votes and is governed by Bush's brother, Jeb Bush.\nThomas Wolf, former IU-Southeast dean of political science, said the polls are a credible gauge of public opinion, but they don't necessarily show who will win the election.\n"(Gore) could win the election with a majority of the electoral college and a minority of the popular vote," Wolf said. "If it's going to happen, this is the closest (election) I can recall in my life."\nWolf also attributed Gore's slide in the polls to a poor showing during the debate. While a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll reported 48 percent said Gore "did a better job" in the debate, compared to 41 percent for Bush, Wolf said he thinks that in reviewing the debate, undecided voters are changing their minds.\n"The press has checked out some of the things that Gore has said, and they turned out to be not exactly correct," he said. "The clips that have been re-run show Gore being agitated, and I think some voters have taken that as a sign of being impolite, if not immature. These may have been people who were undecided."\nRieselbach said the vice presidential debates might have also factored into the findings. The Gallup poll was conducted immediately after the vice presidential debate, which took place Thursday.\n"Dick Cheney came across as a calm, cool and articulate defender of the Bush position," Rieselbach said. "That may alleviate some of the doubts about Bush's own leadership capability"