Polls and Prayers and Promises

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"[T]alk of poems and prayers and promises
And things that we believe in
How sweet it is to love someone
How right it is to care
How long it's been since yesterday
And what about tomorrow
And what about our dreams
And all the memories we share."

John Denver

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With about a week left in the presidential race and polls showing Barack Obama on his way to victory, John McCain wants the voting public to know what he thinks of polls.

"Those polls have consistently shown me much farther behind than we actually are," McCain said on "Meet the Press" Sunday. "You’re going to be up very, very late on Election Night."

The Financial Times, the British-based competitor to the Wall Street Journal, says McCain would "pull off the biggest electoral upset since 1948" if he wins.

"There are enough stray signs of hope," writes James Carney in TIME, "to keep the candidate and the campaign going."

Andy Barr and Harry Siegel report, in Politico.com, that oddsmakers have made McCain a substantial longshot for victory next week.

I've seen candidates who resigned themselves to defeat days, if not weeks, before an election and simply went through the motions. For example, in the final week of the 1980 campaign, following his unimpressive debate performance against Ronald Reagan, President Carter was clearly going through the motions.

He was so eager to get the campaign over with that he made his concession speech to Reagan relatively early on Election Night — a few hours before the polls had closed in many states in the western half of the country.

That's a traditionally Republican part of the United States, anyway, but political scientists have long speculated that, by giving up as early as he did, Carter discouraged many Democratic voters from stopping at the polls on their way home from work, possibly depriving several incumbent Democrats of votes that might have kept them in office.

A noteworthy example was Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, who lost his seat by less than 4,400 votes — although I have always been skeptical about the Democrats' prospects for retaining even a slender majority in the Senate following that election.

Other high-profile Democratic senators, like George McGovern of South Dakota and Warren Magnuson of Washington, lost by such wide margins that Carter's early concession speech couldn't possibly have altered those outcomes.

Then again, if Carter hadn't chosen to phone it in during the last week of the campaign, who knows what kind of influence that might have had on the other races?

Anyway, what could have been a more limited victory for the Republicans in 1980 became a GOP takeover of the Senate and a narrowing of the Democratic majority in the House — not just the loss of the White House.

When the candidate at the top of the ballot goes on a mental vacation before the votes have been counted, he does his party no favors — whether he checks out early on Election Night or bails a week before.

Even if you're the captain of the Titanic and the iceberg is in your path, you owe it to those who are counting on you to give it your best effort — even if that means ultimately going down with the ship.