For what it's worth, most of the polls showing Bush with more than a 5 point lead were taken DURING his convention. Everything post convention has been much tighter.

And according to this, 51% say Bush does not deserve to be re-elected. Now as much as Kerry should want to be ahead, Bush should want to, as an incumbent, have massively better approval ratings than this.

Basically I'm saying the race is a lot tighter than we are generally lead to believe, but Alex is right that, given how generally unpopular Bush is there's virtually no excuse for Kerry's not being ahead by a wide margin.

They say Kerry is a closer. It's time.