(Dobbs) Do We Look To The Polls (Again), Or To Something Else?
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Late on election night in 1972, as the ABC News producer on George McGovern’s presidential campaign, I was ushered along with my correspondent Frank Reynolds into McGovern’s suite at the Holiday Inn in Rapid City, South Dakota, his home state. The Democratic standard-bearer was sitting on the edge of his king-size bed, slouched forward, his head in his hands.
All he could say was, “I didn’t see it coming. I knew I might lose, but not like this.”
The final tally would show him losing to Richard Nixon in 49 out of 50 states which, in the ensuing two years of unethical conduct in the Nixon White House, led to the joke, “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts.” As you might infer, Massachusetts was the election night outlier, the 50th state.
I know that is all ancient history, but it has some bearing on the election next Tuesday. Maybe we’re watching the wrong signs.
In McGovern’s case, notwithstanding polls that were forecasting his debacle, he had been steered clear by his handlers of the sight of defeat. So if he didn’t see a sign of disapproval, he took it as a sign of support. For months, almost everywhere we went, if there were pro-Nixon demonstrators out in front of a convention hall where he was due to speak or outside a hotel where he was due to stay, he’d be taken around to the other side. What’s more, Nixon already was up to his ears in scandals and McGovern’s people doggedly told their man that when it came down to the crunch, voters would reject the crook in the White House.
By a two-to-one margin, they didn’t.
It was a classic case of a candidate’s isolation in a presidential campaign— I’ve seen it in others, too— and, when everyone in your circle is telling you you’re doing great, a classic case of denial.
In today’s election cycle, if you’re a Democrat, recent polls have been discouraging. In the first months after the conservative Supreme Court cut down Roe v Wade, which most Americans had supported, Democrats had a heartening surge. But that was back in June and, in politics as in entertainment, you’re only as good as your last act. Like inflation, like crime. The Republicans have been pounding on those issues for the last couple of months and regardless of who or what is actually to blame, the preponderance of polls show them taking the lead. If those polls are to be believed, the Republicans will capture the House next week and maybe even the Senate.
But while obviously the polls could be right on the money, maybe they are the wrong signs to watch, because despite advances in technology, polling in George McGovern’s day, fifty years ago, was in some ways more reliable than it is today.
The simple reason is, it was a simpler time.
Pollsters called voters on their home phones— the only phones anyone had— and without today’s common feature of “caller ID,” when the phone rang, people answered. Most don’t anymore, which skews the pollsters’ assumptions about people who still do, and no one really knows how. What’s more, citizens had more faith and less skepticism about our institutions— it was before robocalls and ceaseless spam— and people responded to the questions they were asked. Most don’t any more. On top of all that, although individual campaigns did their own internal polling in those days, there was only a handful of non-partisan polling firms— Gallup, Roper— whose results got national exposure, and they usually got it right.
They did on McGovern-Nixon. McGovern just didn’t believe it.
His doubt would be more justified today. Polls are taken to push a particular candidate or cause, with too little disclosure about how they come to their conclusions. Yet despite their problematic biases, are included in the mix.
Finally, Nate Silver, the guru of opinion poll analysis with his website FiveThirtyEight (named for the size of the constitutionally established Electoral College), adds two more factors that make polling predictions harder to believe. One is, there is no longer a single gold standard in polling. Each firm has its own approach to balancing the electorate’s demographics and weaving through the variables of voters’ responses. As we have seen, sometimes painfully, they can’t all be right. The other is, since so many polling firms have been stung by their miscalculations in the past few elections, badly overestimating the vote for Democrats (Exhibit A: Clinton-Trump in 2016)…
… there is an incentive for them to pad the Republican count. As Silver puts it, “they’ll get a ton of grief if they miss high on Democrats again.”
So what signs should we be watching? Well, the polls still play a part because while they might be wrong, they also might be right. But also watch the early turnout. It’s not setting records everywhere, but in some states it is, like the intense battleground of Georgia. According to Gabe Sterling, the COO of the office of the Secretary of State, new records are being set right now in both early in-person voting and the early return of absentee ballots. Historically, early voters usually are Democrats, and while Republicans are motivated to take power, it might be fair to say that Democrats, faced with the risk of losing it, they have rarely been more motivated themselves.
Another sign? Surveys show that despite overall discontent with President Biden, it hasn’t translated to a massive shift of Democratic voters backing Republican candidates. Unlike the Reagan Revolution when the failures of Jimmy Carter’s presidency pushed Democrats into Reagan’s Republican camp, the surveys suggest that Democrats who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 would vote for him again if he runs in 2024, especially if he’s up again against Donald Trump. Don’t forget, Biden beat Trump by seven million votes. It’s hard to believe that between the disgrace of January 6th and the myriad ongoing scandals surrounding Trump, he has picked up seven million new fans himself.
Now it all comes down to the next few days: voters filling out their ballots and delivering them by the deadline, and voters who still love voting in person on Election Day itself. It’s crunch time, and both sides have their strongest ambassadors out campaigning this weekend. Donald Trump is stumping for MAGA candidates he has endorsed, while Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Jill Biden are out there for the Democrats. Where races look neck-and-neck, that could make the difference.
At this point it’s all about voter turnout. Fifty years ago, a bigger turnout still wouldn’t have put George McGovern over the top. But in today’s polarized and marginally close campaigns, it might turn the tide for the Democrats, despite new laws in about half the states that were designed to diminish the traditional Democratic vote. Or… it might not.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
It would be interesting to know if the polls actually change a voters choice.
The election is probably OVER. Just a wait for the count . . .