This doesn’t bode we…

This doesn’t bode well for Kerry/Edwards:

July 8 (Bloomberg) — Democratic candidate John Kerry’s standing against President George W. Bush didn’t improve following his pick of North Carolina Senator John Edwards as his running mate July 6, according to a Zogby International poll.

Forty-eight percent of 1,008 likely voters polled by Zogby from July 6-7 supported Kerry and Edwards and 46 percent back Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. The two percentage-point margin is within the poll’s 3.1 percentage point margin of error and matches the two point spread in a Zogby poll taken June 2-5.

Other polls taken after Kerry’s July 6 announcement show the Democrat gaining popularity in a race that is still in a statistical dead heat. A CBS poll found a Kerry-Edwards ticket would draw the support of 49 percent of voters if the election were held now, compared with 44 percent for Bush-Cheney, within the survey’s margin of error. In a June 23-27 poll of the same voters, Kerry drew 45 percent support to Bush’s 44 percent.

“This is not a big bounce electorate,” pollster John Zogby said in a statement. “We are a nation that is split down the middle, polarized and hardened.”

If Zogby’s right, that would make the call for less federal control and more states’ rights even more compelling. If people are completely set in their minds about who they plan to vote for that the traditional bumps in the polls fall flat, then it only makes sense to start pushing out more of the governing to the states, and let people in Rhode Island decide what’s good for Rhode Island and not for Hawaii as well.

Of course, there would be those who’d say that this is a conservative principle (which it is) and hand-wave it away unconsidered, even though it would be in their best interest and the interest of their community. You decide what’s best and you take responsibility, instead of saying that X should happen and force everyone to pay for it. Yeah, you’d still have unhappy liberals in conservative states and unhappy conservatives in liberal states, but the discontent over a governmental policy some don’t agree with would be on a far smaller scale than a national level. And I see that as a Good Thing.

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