To get back to the question asked about why the polls are so close, there are a number of reasons. One is that the polls now are reflecting a period where Obama was on vacation, or just coming off vacation, where McCain was merciliessly sending out negative ad after negative ad. It’s unfortunate that people who would not win elections if they stood on their own records and just ran a completely positive campaign so often win in this country because they can convince more people (who don’t pay enough attention) that their opponent is somehow scary, not ready for the job, dangerous, bad, whatever. When one candidate has the ability to spread that message while the other isn’t countering it, the one who’s being attacked will see his #‘s dip.
But first, you have to look at the makeup of the electorate to really get a big picture. Arianna Huffington actually posed this question in her latest book, she called it the 28/48 disconnect, in that 28% of the people seem to think Bush is doing a great job, yet 48% of people support McCain. She posits the theory that people really remember the Maverick John McCain, the guy who ran in 2000 who was known for crossing party lines. So, McCain has been popular with so-called independents who like a little of what each side has to say, but he’s been somewhat unpopular with the Republican base which values loyalty above all and expects their candidates to be lock step with the conservative agenda. So, what McCain has had to do on one hand is cozy up to the Bush policies that are the most important to the base (like making his tax cuts permanent, staying in Iraq, working to repeal Roe v. Wade), while really not focusing on his record so the independents don’t really realize that on every issue of importance, he’s shifted his position to be lock step with the unpopular base.
Yet, when you say the base is unpopular, it is still 28% of the voting public. If you look at the other side of the equation, there are about 28% of Democrats who would not abandon the Democratic party no matter how failed their policies might be, that leaves nearly 45% of the voting public which are the so-called independents. Well, research has shown that realisically, 1/3 of the “independents” are really independent Republican leaners and 1/3 are independent Democrat leaners, and the other 1/3 are truly independent. So, you end up with basically 43% who are going to vote for the Republican no matter what, and 43% who are going to vote for the Democrat no matter what, and that leaves about 14% in the middle who really decide the elections.
Now, realize that of all the people who actually CAN vote, in the election with the highest turnout (2004), only 60% actually excercized that right, so realistically, you are only talking about having to convince 60% of 14% of the public to vote for you, or about 8%. But really, you only have to convince one more than half of that number, so when you think about it, you need to make the more persuasive argument to just over half of about 8 percent of the population.
So, Obama makes a compelling enough case that he has been at times up by 3 or 4 points (he has 5 to 6 out of 8 of those people), but McCain just gets one or two out of 8 of those people to have second thoughts about Obama, and BAM, dead heat.
But take heart, there’s another factor that is going largely ignored, and it makes me supremely confident that Obama will win (which I’ll get to later). I mean, first off, of course, the conventions haven’t happened yet, we haven’t had debates yet, and the Republicans have turned this into an up or down on Obama…McCain’s flip flopping, cozying up to the right wing and abandonment of his long held principles haven’t even been exposed to the light of day for most voters (yet). Most voters don’t yet have wind of a lot of the things McCain will do that follow pretty close to the Bush model, and it’s the job of the Democrats and the Obama campaign to make that happen…I’m confident they will be effective at pushing this message.
But the ace in the hole I alluded to is voter turnout. One of the things that people always talk about is voter turnout, particularly the “youth” vote, and it always seems that no matter how confident the dems are that they will bring out the youth vote, the younger generation always tends to disappoint. But I think this year will be different, and the reason why I think this is voter registration, and the sheer number of people who voted in the primaries and caucuses (and the percentage of them that were younger), along with the record percentage of younger delegates to the convention this year. It seems reasonable to assume that a college kid who drags himself out in the winter to something as unsexy as the primary is going to make it to the main event.
And voter registration alone points to one severe deficit in the polls. First of all, pollsters try to make an accurate judgement about who is going to turn out, they call this the “likely voter”. So, what they do is they start by saying in such and such a state, in the last election, 40% were Democrats and 60% were Republicans, so they are going to try to build a sample of respondents matching the voter rolls. They also use the names of the people who actually came out and voted to poll from, thinking that if you voted before, it means you are likely to vote again. Now, this helps get an accurate sample to a degree, but it ignores a number of things. Since the last election, demographics would have shifted, maybe Republicans have made a mass exodus and Democrats have filled the void. It also ignores what’s happening on the ground in real time. If Obama’s people are getting 10 new Democrats to register to vote for every Republican the McCain camp is registering, that means they are using an outdated model…maybe that state is now 50/50, and they don’t pick up well on it. They try, but the nature of the beast is that they don’t have real time information like this.
So, in a year when Obama is doing an extraordinary job of bringing new people into the process, it’s a big advantage for him that doesn’t show up in the polls. And people wonder if all these folks are really going to show up. Well, in every election we’ve had, we’ve had essentially 2 rich old white men, neither of whom would impact anyone’s day to day lives. Now, we have a candidate who has come by his wealth recently, who is young and not white, who believes in a bottom up economic theory to replace our trickle down economics. He is the first person to run for the office who really champions the populist issues that most Presidential candidates have avoided with a 10 foot pole. So, if you’re a young person interested in social and economic justice, Obama is going to inspire you…that’s why he has this rockstar persona. And so many of those people aren’t being counted. If you are dirt poor, working 3 jobs, and it would cost you 2 hours of work plus bus fare both ways to vote for President, in no other year would a candidate have said anything which could really make you believe they’d make your life better, now you’ve got a candidate who speaks for you.
The whole point of negative advertising is to turn off that 40% that doesn’t turn out, to keep them at home by making them think that there really is no difference…both guys are sleazy, interested in little more than their own power, and if you listen to the ads, either one is dangerous in his own way. The message Obama can get across to a number of these people (and is getting across based on how many new people are being registered) is that who is President really DOES matter. He has the best possible contrast between himself and Bush in fact, he can point to how much worse off people are under Bush and offer them an alternative that seems more real than previous years when it was 2 boring old rich white men who took contrary positions on a few hot button issues but in all practicality operated on about the same level.
So, pollsters are missing a huge number of people who are going to come out and vote for Obama, but who aren’t identified, and the problem is also compounded by the cell phone issue. Younger people are FAR more likely to not even own a land line these days, relying solely on their cell phones. Well, pollsters can’t call cell phones. Ergo, they are undersampling the youth vote. All in all, what this points to is that no matter what the number say, I fully expect that come election day, Obama will do much better than he is polling at the time, and the size of his victory will come as a surprise. So, don’t worry, be happy, and vote Obama.
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