Here's a New York Times story that has some really, really bad news for John Kerry. Naturally, the story buries this information.

The Times/CBS News poll offered the latest evidence that the race for president was as tight as has long been predicted. Even after two weeks in which Mr. Bush has run televised advertisements promoting himself and attacking Mr. Kerry, and in which Mr. Kerry has enjoyed the glow of favorable coverage that greeted his near-sweep of Democratic primaries, the two men are effectively tied, with 46 percent of voters saying they supported Mr. Bush and 43 percent backing Mr. Kerry.

Get that? Bush is beating Kerry by three points among all adults. Given all the negatives, that's pretty damned good. But that's not really all that important. It's far too soon to tell anything about that. Here's the important part:

The candidacy of Ralph Nader looms as a potentially lethal threat to Democratic hopes of regaining the White House: With Mr. Nader in the race, Mr. Bush leads Mr. Kerry by 46 percent to 38 percent, with Mr. Nader drawing 7 percent of the votes. In a sign of the polarized electorate Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry are facing, three-quarters of supporters of each candidate asserted they would not change their mind before the election.

Get that? Given all of the talk about how Democrats are:
1) United.
2) Energized.
3) "Anybody but Bush"

Don't you think that Nader should be getting about 1-2% in the poll, especially at this early point in the campaign. John Kerry really hasn't had time yet to piss anyone off. This is seriously bad news for the Kerry campaign. This means that some percentage of the left is really, really, resistant to John Kerry.

As well, the same CBS/NYT poll shows that Kerry's favorable/unfavorable has slipped to 28/29 in two weeks (it was previously at 37/28). That's a pretty strong southward movement in his favorables.

Other oddities in the poll:
By 59 percent to 35 percent, respondents said they supported a constitutional amendment that would "allow marriage only between a man and a woman." But 56 percent said that they did not view the issue as important enough to merit changing the nation's constitution.

Ummm... Yeah. I never get these people, the ones who support a Constitutional Amendment, but don't think the issue is important enough for a Constitutional Amendment. That's a position worthy of John Kerry, come to think of it. Still, polls are now showing support for the Amendment consistently near 60%, and I don't think it'll be going down anytime soon.

"It seems like a waste of time and energy when we should be thinking more about figuring out how we're going to have Social Security," said Ronald Sharp, 44, a Republican and retired mental health care aide from Detroit.

What's odd about this picture? I wonder how many "mental health care aides" get to retire at 44, in any case. He must be the one Republican in Detroit.