I would have picked November 3.
THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
However, win or lose, we must remember > that on the day after the election, Bush will be president and will never > face election again. He might be president for two months or four years, but he will remain president. In either case, he will be more concerned about his place in history and his own sense of what must be done than in political considerations. It follows that he will try to shape the war decisively in either case.
Al Qaeda will be facing, in either case, a world in which it has failed to ignite the Islamic masses and in which the general political tendencies in the Islamic world have not only not fulfilled al Qaeda's hopes, but have moved against them. At some point, they will have to assert themselves somewhere. Al Qaeda has political goals and it must generate some movement toward achieving them. With those two imperatives in mind, the decline in the importance of the > Iraqi theater of operations will generate massive forces pointing to further military confrontations after the elections, quite apart from the threat of terrorist actions.