The New Political Horizon Ahead

When all of us wake up on November 8th, there will be a new political horizon ahead of us. This will happen no matter who wins or loses.

It has been observed by some that in the closing days of this year¹s elections the Republicans appear to be surging. If this is so, it is because most of the undecided voters this year were those who usually vote Republican, and they are coming home to vote for their party on Election Day.

A word of caution to Republicans: Even if there is a GOP surge in the closing days, most of the critical House and Senate races remain too close to call. If some candidates who were written off only a few days ago now have their races "at play," there is no guarantee that Republicans will actually win many or most of these races, or many of the "battleground" contests so important to control of each house of the Congress. In spite of the apparent surge, it might not be a good night for Republicans when the votes ar counted.

A word of caution to Democrats: For weeks and months, there has been a growing crescendo of Beltway pundit prophecy that a Democratic tide (in the form of the newly-fashionable term "tsunami") is coming that will sweep the Democrats back to power in the Congress, governorships and state legislatures. While Democrats will almost certainly make gains in all of these, the prospects of a national political landslide, a relatively rare occurrence in American politics, remains speculative, even up to Election Day itself. It might not be as good a night for Democrats as many of them think is now inevitable.

In fact, one party may win most of the close races, but all of these by small margins. Would this be a mandate? Would this be a humiliating defeat?

The Democrats have perhaps taken the greatest risk by allowing a "fellow-traveling" media and even non-partisan pundits to create the expectation of an historic Democratic victory that will restore their party to congressional power and rebuke President George W. Bush. A landslide could happen, but the only "objective evidence" of this has been a myriad of volatile political polls, few of which may have been accurate or instructive. Political polling has become a lucrative industry as we begin the 21st century, but the quality of polls has been in decline for decades.

John Podhoretz has recently said that most political polls this year are "garbage," and that the pollsters know it. The low initial response to pollsters by the public is one of the reasons why the "margin of error" is much larger than pollsters will admit. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, it is no wonder that most pollsters maintain a cabal of silence about the true value of their product. In virtually all of the contested major races this year, there are numerous polls which have attempted to measure voter sentiment. There are local and state polls (mostly by newspapers and universities), and national polls conducted by consultants and pollsters for cash and for media attention that promotes their polls.

A detailed examination of the mathematical and statistical reasons why polls have become so inaccurate over the past several decades belongs to another page and another time, but I am convinced (and believe it can be undeniably demonstrated) that the so-called margins of error in most political polls is not the usual three to five points, but really ten points or more. If that is so, the dependence on polls by the media and politicians is not only unjustified, but is likely to misinform the public. This year the evidence is rather overwhelming in that similar polls taken at the same time with similar samples have come up with such divergent results. Who is to be believed? A large daily newspaper such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, just to cite one example, which in 1978 deliberately distorted its poll results to print poll numbers that were so far off from the actual results only a day later that no mathematical explanation was possible? (The newspaper later admitted its polling staff "adjusted" the numbers to fit their own political prejudices.) Since its poll was reinstituted in the 1980's, the Star Tribune has frequently been far off the final results. The explanation? "We did not detect a late surge." In 2006, the Star Tribune has routinely published poll numbers for major state races that greatly diverge in many cases even from other published polls. (For their sake, I hope the Star Tribune is correct this year, because the state's many new political blogs, many of them nationally respected, will be watching closely and are not likely to forget poll irregularities this year as has happened so often in the past.)

Whatever happened to reporters and analysts talking to voters and not to themselves about what an electorate is thinking? That does not mean a feature interview with one selected Democrat and one selected Republican and one selected independent. It means weeks and months of attending public meetings, private campaign events, and interviewing lots of voters. Of course, many of our best political analysts do just that. The more conservative Michael Barone and the more liberal David Broder (now 85 years old!), just to name two, do it every election cycle, travelling out of Washington, DC, and observing the political landscapes for themselves. And there are others, too. But our punditsphere is becoming increasingly sedentary and dependent on polls.

I said we will shortly have a new political horizon no matter what the outcome of the 2006 elections. Part of that will be a quick shift to the 2008 presidential elections. Since no incumbent president or vice president will be running, and both parties will have numerous candidates in the contest, politicians will, almost without a pause, try to create a sense of a permanent American political campaign, even as most Americans will still be weary from the last one.

More than two years will remain for the Bush presidency, and although conventional wisdom says he will be a very lame duck, especially if he loses the House and the Senate, he has been underestimated before. And he may not lose.

The Republicans have John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and darkhorse Mitt Romney, all charismatic politicians, waiting to succeed him. The Democrats so far have Hillary Clinton. Period.

Franklin Roosevelt asked in 1925 "Is there a Jefferson on the horizon?" In 2006, who is on the Democratic horizon?