Respectfully disagreeing with John Zogby's hypothesis that 2004 is "John Kerry's to lose," pollster Scott Rasmussen offers his own prognosis of the next six months:

While the polls have shown an incredibly tight race for months, I don't believe it will be that close on Election Day in November. I'm not envisioning a landslide, but believe the most likely scenario is for one candidate or the other to win a modestly comfortable victory.

Why do I say this? Because events in Iraq and the economy will determine the outcome. Those situations will change for better or worse and voters will decide accordingly. If they go one direction, Bush wins. If they go the other way, Kerry wins.

Rasmussen believes that the investor class will wield far greater electoral leverage this year than in 1992 — that may explain why President Bush, while regaining his sizeable lead over John Kerry for voter's trust on national security, is back in a statistical tie over stewardship of the economy. Wall Street has reacted sharply to inflation concerns brought on, ironically, by lede after lede of good news; whatever general increase of confidence a solidly growing economy achieves is offset by fickle investors watching their stocks closely, their mood following the rise and dip of the Dow.

More obvious is American sensitivity to progress in Iraq. Brighter months of February and March saw much higher levels of public trust and faith than April and May have; I've had personal experience with gloom among colleagues. Despite stateside pessimism, however, we have every reason to believe that our enemies failed in April. They died in great numbers, could not win popular support or distract Iraqis from the prize of freedom, and submitted their size, location and strength on terms of conventional warfare. Abettor Syria, too, seems to have finally won itself Washington's darkening glare. Though insurgent decline may be staggered over the next several months, it looks inexorable, especially for the thugs of Muqtada al-Sadr. The Fallujah thugs, loosely surrounded at last report, have been silent for two weeks.

Can the enemy rise again? Insurgents know their own window of opportunity, something that must have contributed to the choice of April for an offensive. To salvage their mission to kill Iraq's infant democracy by disheartening America, enemy factions would want to attack in force again this fall — or raise at least one more cacophony between now and November to further erode confidence in the occupation. Such an event would heavily influence the presidential election — a possibility that places the future of Iraq, contrary to Rasmussen and Zogby, right in the hands of President Bush. He is in control. If the Khomeinists and Ba'athists are kept caged and bled, they might be so exhausted that they cannot mount attacks on Allies and Iraqis with the same coordination and media manipulation as in April — the first and only time when they appreciably shook American determination. The question is, as we've come to understand, whether methods endorsed by the president — combining bursts of action with Iraqi encouragement — will work.