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A continually updated report from the campaign trail reported and edited by the Washington bureau of The Times and produced by NYTimes.com
POLITICAL POINTS
A Shock Jock Voting Bloc?
By JOHN TIERNEY
SWING voters may be in relatively short supply this year, but they definitely exist, and a surprising number of them may be listening to Howard Stern on their way to church.
A new analysis found that 21 percent of voters were either undecided or so tentatively committed to one presidential candidate that they would be willing to reconsider. That is low compared with the share of voters up for grabs at this point in past elections - 33 percent in 2000, 27 percent in 1996 and 31 percent in 1992 - but enough to give one candidate a decisive victory.
"People have been saying that this election will be a repeat of what we saw four years ago, but there is still a sizable number of voters with a favorable view of both candidates," said Andrew Kohut, the director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which conducted the analysis. "The election might be close, but a candidate who did a really good job of reaching these persuadable voters could win by a gap of five percentage points or more."
Unfortunately for Republicans, a lot of these voters tune their radios to Mr. Stern, who has been crusading to oust President Bush. Mr. Stern is angry at the Federal Communications Commission, which cracked down on stations that broadcast a show of his that discussed anal sex and what the commission called "repeated flatulence sound effects."
Mr. Stern, who has backed Republican candidates in the past, has a mother lode of swing voters in his audience, according to a poll by the New Democrat Network, an advocacy group. Its pollster, Mark Penn, calculates that this "Stern Gang" of swing voters makes up 4 percent of the likely voters this year, nearly as large as the entire Hispanic vote in 2000.
But one bit of solace for Republicans is that Mr. Stern's listeners go to church frequently, which tends to correlate with voting Republican. The poll showed that Mr. Stern's listeners were slightly more likely than nonlisteners to call themselves born-again Christians and were three times more likely to attend church daily. The pollsters did not ask why they went to church after listening to Mr. Stern, so there is no way to calculate how many were performing an act of contrition.