Too close to call?

For some reason, I am just not buying comfortably into the idea that this is going to be a neck-and-neck election. Maybe for several reasons. One is that I have recently witnessed the Venezuelan process wherein the polls called for an excrutiatingly close election (some even calling it the opposite from the way it actually went down) that was anything but close. Another is that I see and read about too many Republicans who have become very sorry they voted for Butthead the first time. Another is that no matter what the media tell us, people all around are losing jobs and health care, and are in a personal financial pickle - that translates into some unhappy voters who don't know what the traffic problem is but they feel that they need to blame whoever is at the wheel. And another is that I keep thinking of the Reagan landslide that was a surprise to me at least.

I Googled up these articles trying to find some information on what the polls were predicting during that election.

The first one is a 1981 critique (pdf) of the pre-election polls in 1980, which can probably be extrapolated to present-day polls. The second is an article from May of this year.

The performance of the public polls during the general election campaign of 1980 has raised doubts about the capabilities of the pollsters and their survey methodology--doubts which have not been raised during the last seven presidential elections.

...There has been much speculation about what went wrong with the pre-election polls of 1980. All the major published polls seriously understated Ronald Reagan's margin of victory over Jimmy Carter...based mostly on interviewing completed late in the week before election day. The candidate polls, on the other hand, did continue their polling through election eve, and did indicate the correct magnitude of Reagan's victory.

That article goes on to describe in painful detail the methodology of voting polls. The second article (from May of this year) takes the position that there could be a Kerry landslide.

Everyone expected the 1980 election to be very close. In fact, Reagan won with 50.8 percent of the popular vote to Carter's 41 percent (independent John Anderson won 6.6 percent)--which translated into an electoral avalanche of 489 to 49. The race was decided not so much on the public's nascent impressions of the challenger, but on their dissatisfaction with the incumbent.

...Nor was Carter's sound defeat an aberration. Quite the opposite. Of the last five incumbent presidents booted from office--Bush I, Carter, Ford, Herbert Hoover, and William Howard Taft--only one was able to garner over 200 electoral votes, and three of these defeated incumbents didn't even cross the 100 electoral-vote threshold...


...2004 could be a decisive victory for Kerry. The reason to think so is historical. Elections that feature a sitting president tend to be referendums on the incumbent--and in recent elections, the incumbent has either won or lost by large electoral margins. If you look at key indicators beyond the neck-and-neck support for the two candidates in the polls--such as high turnout in the early Democratic primaries and the likelihood of a high turnout in November--it seems improbable that Bush will win big. More likely, it's going to be Kerry in a rout.

Of course it is entirely possible that through some last minute surprise revelation about one or the other candidates, the public will stampede toward the other. One thing is certain, we don't have long to find out how this one goes.