Sunday, August 17, 2008

Why Isn't This Election a Done Deal?


"In a number of key swing states, the percentage of voters who backed Clinton and who said that 'the race of the candidates' was 'important' in their decision was alarmingly high: in New Jersey, 9; in Ohio and Pennsylvania, more than 11. The writer John Judis reckons, therefore, that in the general election (where the voting population is markedly less liberal than in the primaries) in those states, '15 to 20 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents may not support [Obama] for the same reason.'"

John Heilemann, New York Magazine


I hear this all the time.

Barack Obama should be way ahead of John McCain in the polls. The war is unpopular, the economy is in the toilet, McCain's party (which is the lame-duck president's party) is unpopular.

But the polls only show Obama leading McCain by a few points. Is it racism?

Well, as my friend Kyle so often points out, polls have no real meaning. Especially in August. People haven't really made up their minds yet. The conventions haven't been held. The debates haven't been held. No votes have been counted.

And that's the only thing that will matter when a president is chosen — real votes that are cast in the legally prescribed manner in each state.

It doesn't matter what people tell pollsters — sometimes people lie, and they may be particularly inclined to lie when one of the presidential candidates belongs to a racial minority and the respondent wishes to appear politically correct.

Nor does it matter how the pollsters may interpret their results — questions can be phrased to elicit a desired response, whether the pollster wishes to create the illusion of a horserace where one doesn't exist or wishes to skew the results to favor a particular candidate or issue position.

My view is that polls serve as a guidepost, a snapshot of how some voters in a particular area feel about a campaign or an issue. They can give you a general idea of public sentiment at a particular time.

But the fact that a poll reports one thing in August does not necessarily mean actual voting results will say the same thing in November.

I have found that it is more useful to study voting patterns for clues to how a city or county or state is likely to vote.

For example, the state of Colorado is frequently being mentioned as a probable "swing" state. It has voted for the Republican nominee in every election in the last 40 years except one — 1992, when Bill Clinton carried the state with 40% of the vote, possibly because of the presence of Ross Perot on the ballot (Perot received nearly one-quarter of Colorado's votes).

In 1996, even though the economy was strong and he was the incumbent, Clinton lost Colorado to Bob Dole.

So, in spite of the fact that no Democrat has received a majority of Colorado's votes since 1964, many people are saying that, because Obama has been doing well in Colorado polls, the state will be competitive in November. I wrote about this in July, when I made my first assessment of the general election campaign, based primarily on previous voting patterns.

And I predicted at the time that, in spite of what the polls were saying, Colorado will remain in the Republican column.

I still believe that is what will happen.

What I find to be more telling about the current state of affairs in Colorado is the breakdown of party allegiances, according to voter registration. Recently, I wrote about editorials in the Denver Post, one of which mentioned the latest figures in Colorado — "Of the state's 2.8 million voters, 34.19% are unaffiliated, 34.14% are Republicans and 31.2% are Democrats," the Post said.

The unaffiliated voters will determine the outcome in Colorado, but the Democrats need to win the lion's share of those voters to overcome the advantage Republicans have in registration.

The Republicans could lose the unaffiliated voters yet still receive enough votes to carry Colorado.

Anyway, I've been thinking about all this today after reading a couple of articles.
  • One is John Heilemann's article in New York Magazine.

    Heilemann writes, "In a year when more than 80% of voters think the country is on the wrong track, when Democratic registration is surging and the Republican brand is in the crapper, when McCain is on the wrong side of the public on the war and the economy, his senior moments occurring with staggering regularity — in a year like this, why is the race so close? Why isn’t Obama creaming his rival? Why is he, at best, just a few points ahead, and stubbornly stalled below 50% in every national poll?"

    Heilemann's answer — racism.

    "Even now, there is intense dispute about whether the so-called Bradley effect — named after the African-American former mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, whose race for governor of California became synonymous with white voters misleading survey-takers about their intentions — helps explain Clinton’s shock-the-world comeback victory in New Hampshire," Heilemann writes, referring to a phenomenon I've written about in this blog.

    "And in primaries too numerous to list, exit polls overpredicted Obama’s performance, leading cable commentators to hint that blowouts were at hand, only to watch the results roll in and prove tighter than anyone expected."

  • The other article I've been reading today is Frank Rich's piece in the New York Times, which suggests that we really don't know John McCain the way we think we do.

    Obama, he writes, "should be winning in a landslide against the despised party of Bush-Cheney, and he’s not. He should be passing the 50% mark in polls, and he’s not. He’s been done in by that ad with Britney and Paris and by a new international crisis that allows McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred. Let the neocons identify a new battleground for igniting World War III, whether Baghdad or Tehran or Moscow, and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts."

    As Rich goes on to say, "It seems almost churlish to look at some actual facts." And those facts are:

    1. "No presidential candidate was breaking the 50% mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys)."

    2. "Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40% to Jimmy Carter’s 46)."

    Rich contends, "Obama should be running away with the thing. Even Michael Dukakis was beating the first George Bush by 17 percentage points in the summer of 1988.

    "Of course, were Obama ahead by 17 points today, the same prognosticators now fussing over his narrow lead would be predicting that the arrogant and presumptuous Obama was destined to squander that landslide on vacation and tank just like his hapless predecessor."


    Rich thinks "the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is."

    He may be right about that. He cites a recent Pew Research Center survey that suggests voters have been hearing too much about Obama and not enough about McCain.

    Rich makes a good point when he asserts, "What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image." I presume he refers to the image that McCain cultivated during his 2000 Republican nomination campaign against George W. Bush, an image that is outdated in 2008, as Rich says.

    Rich says many in the media have given McCain a "free pass." And he commends the fact that "[s]ome of those who know McCain best — Republicans — are tougher on him than the press is."

    He also refers to the Talking Points Memo blog and its efforts to inform its readers about who McCain is. (You can find a link to that blog in the right-hand column of this blog.)
Personally, I believe that, if you think the problem is that people don't know as much about McCain as they should, you should utilize research tools that are available to you.

For example:
  1. McCainPedia — A site launched by the Democratic Party, ostensibly to provide the facts about McCain and his record.

  2. FactCheck.org — A good site for information on both candidates.
The truth is out there. It's up to each voter to seek the answers.

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