At last, polls that matter

The News Virginian
Published: November 3, 2008

An election is under way, which means initially and perhaps principally that Americans’ necks have been freed from the iron grip of the polls. By day’s end we should know whether the polls have been right or terribly wrong.

While flailing in ostensible futility at an opponent who has remained just beyond reach, John McCain grasped for a different kind of hope, an element of which suggests the pollsters have erred and done so mightily. The gap has fluctuated – one poll at this writing shows McCain up by 1 percentage point; others place him down in double digits – but a gap it has mostly remained, especially in swing states, including Virginia.

In dreaming of an upset, McCain and the credulous among his proselytes appear to tilt toward delusions. The polls are imprecise but on the subject of outcomes rarely wrong. The consensus leader on election day has won seven of the last eight presidential elections. The solitary exception was in 2000, and here the pollsters still had it right: Al Gore won the popular vote, which the polls seek to predict, but lost Florida and with it the Electoral College.

Even that bit of history in which McCain finds solace, Truman’s toppling of Republican Thomas Dewey in 1948, requires an asterisk. In those pioneer days of polling, Gallup stopped a week before the election – which sounds so horse-and-buggy in an era when every public flutter is measured and chronicled – and so missed the pass as Truman hit the gas at the finish line.

Polls this election year have proliferated like rabbits feeling extra frisky, and so too the variables. First, there is the Bradley effect, known in these parts as the Wilder effect. This theory supposes that Democrat Tom Bradley, ahead in the polls, lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election because of voters’ reluctance to select a black candidate. Douglas Wilder won the Virginia race for governor seven years later, but narrowly despite being comfortably ahead in the polls.

Creating the same kind of discomfort for Barack Obama with the notable difference in outcome is precisely what McCain intends today, and he may not be terribly concerned about the aid of effects, though experts dispute Bradley. McCain insiders talk about another variable with an effect, that of Obama’s image as an ultra-hip version of messiah. Some people contacted by pollsters may have been reluctant to confess that beneath it all they’re too square to feel the Obama groove.

Other factors swirl. No candidate since Reagan has mesmerized like Obama, and even the Gipper’s appeal was different, and in a way, lesser. Cable network news, which existed only as CNN during the Reagan era, is entranced with Obama. So too may be some pollsters, a generation of which has arisen this cycle like baby boomers after the war.

The product of all of this tonight or later will be either a vindication or repudiation of the polls and perhaps only the latter for journalists, so-called, in television’s nether reaches where the idea that the election ended shortly after the party conventions has been championed. Liberals long have permeated TV, but so too have professionals. Television news has become like baseball in the era of expansion and five-man rotations: bush-league pitchers now play in The Show, where clearly they do not belong.

Given the hundreds of millions of dollars Obama invested in his campaign and the extraordinary spending advantage he enjoyed over McCain, the Democrat should win convincingly, or donors should demand their money back. To lose would be a failure in the fashion of Enron, leaving backers to wonder how a campaign so flush with support could lose everything so suddenly. The cooks of books, in this case, would be big media, who waved poll numbers as banners but rarely cast them under scrutiny.

For all of these reasons as well as those ordinarily associated with an election, voters of all persuasions are advised to make their way to the polls that matter. And in the meantime, pipe down and listen, Keith Olbermann. The voters speak.