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The Incredible Shrinking Race?

Two days before Election Day, and everyone is all atwitter about the apparent closing of the gap between the parties in the final week.  People are suddenly excited, or at least slightly anxious, about Conrad Burns’ prospects after six months of the Montana Senator’s living political death.  Lincoln Chafee is making a comeback!  The generic polling is tightening!  […]

Two days before Election Day, and everyone is all atwitter about the apparent closing of the gap between the parties in the final week.  People are suddenly excited, or at least slightly anxious, about Conrad Burns’ prospects after six months of the Montana Senator’s living political death.  Lincoln Chafee is making a comeback!  The generic polling is tightening!  I am unimpressed. 

I will stick to my reckless predictions, and I may well be proven wrong (perhaps badly wrong) along with many major political prognosticators in the country who foresee some kind of “wave” or “hurricane” or general calamity for the GOP.  All of this last-minute polling showing us a sudden turnaround smells fishy.  Not, “someone is rigging the numbers” fishy, but simply, “this makes no sense” fishy.  As has been noted somewhere, either these last polls are unrepresentative and incorrect, or polling for the entire year has been off by huge margins.  Nothing else really explains it.  I refuse to believe that the inane, the ridiculous, the absurd controversy over John Kerry has this much power over the electorate.  I have to admit that I will lose what little respect I have for the mass electorate if this was the cause of their sudden change of mind, if there was indeed a sudden change of mind and not some odd glitch at the end.  Not because people don’t have a right to change their mind or decide that the party of John Kerry is ridiculous (objectively, it is ridiculous), but because you would have to be such an, ahem, easily-led, media-driven caricature of a thinking voter to have your vote swayed by something so trivial and so media-hyped.  You would have to be the kind of easily manipulated blank slate that many Republican pundits think that the average voter is, and I cannot abide the idea that voters are that easily turned by some cheap, last-minute concocted controversy.  I have a low opinion of democracy, of course, and a sudden GOP comeback would confirm me in all of my worst suspicions about the irrationality, the idiocy, the worthlessness of this form of government.  Prove me wrong.  Make me say something positive about democratic government, as much as it will annoy me to do so, and give me an example of where, for once, the government was actually more or less held accountable for what it did.  I would be glad to acknowledge the wisdom of the people if I ever encountered it.  It is just that the last four or five elections have made me think that it doesn’t exist.  Prove me, the one who mocks and loathes democracy, wrong.  Don’t just throw the bums out, but hurl them from their high places, cast down their idols and break the statues of their false gods.  Tar and feather them, strike them and buffet them as you drive them into the wilderness to be food for the vultures and the dogs.  Show that there is still some tiny ember of self-government still barely flickering out there somewhere.        

I will say a few things about why the new polls might be right and why all of us who predicted the hurricane will be in for disappointment and embarrassment come Tuesday night.  Honesty requires it, even if the defenders of the Red Republicans will not indulge in a similar facing of certain realities.  In theory, Democrats should do amazingly well this year, and again according to every trend that anyone pays attention to they have every advantage.  The right track/wrong track numbers are extremely bad for the incumbents; approval of Congress is about as bad as it gets; the President’s numbers, while less abysmal than they have been, are still pretty awful.  If we calculated this election on paper, the GOP could give up right now.  They stand to get creamed in the House races, and well they should.  However, in the real world, Democratic voters have this bad habit of not showing up for midterms.  This is one of those things that has been Best Left Unmentioned this year, but it is a well-established pattern for all midterm elections. 

This pattern was supposed to be reversed this year, because of tremendous motivation and discontent with the administration; conservative disenchantment and disaffection were supposed to be very significant and help offset old GOP advantages.  The motivation factor, which always works to Republican advantage in off-year elections (when those who tend to vote Democratic are paying much less attention when the Caesar contest isn’t occurring), was supposed to be on the Dems’side.  It is entirely possible that a lot of people have claimed that they were motivated and enthusiastic about these elections, but are still not going to do the necessary work to cast the votes needed to make the Democrats successful.  It would be like a kid who is offered $50 to mow your lawn and who becomes really excited at the prospect of getting the $50, but who is at the same time completely uninterested in doing the necessary labour to get it.  Virtually everyone would like to see the Republicans chastised, but how many are interested in making the small effort to vote to make sure that they are?  That is the tricky part. 

There may be other reasons why the new polling is right.  The Democrats have coasted along on the “look, we’re not Republicans!” theme and have benefited from bad news, incompetence, scandal and implosion on the other side.  Things have been fun for the past six months if you are a Democrat.  But, as we all know, they have offered nothing in the way of an alternative policy (except that they will raise the minimum wage and hold hearings on Iraq–wow!).  The argument was that they didn’t have to, and that this was all a referendum on GOP misrule.  The opposition party simply had to be against the ruling party and it would win.  Their support has therefore always been a function of how much more people despised the GOP than they distrusted the Democrats (which, given many people’s attitudes towards the Democrats, requires tremendous loathing).  Should the voters’ loathing for the GOP diminish (it seems unclear why this would have happened over the past week) or their mistrust of the Democrats grow (the Kerry business? absurd!), the Democrats’ main advantage (that they are not Republicans) will have been badly diminished.  Their support, which we have seen throughout the year in poll after poll, may be a mile wide and an inch deep, and we are finding that fair-weather possible Democratic voters have bolted because something about the Dems put them off at the last minute.  Or perhaps they were never completely sold on the Dems in the first place and were always going to return to the fetid, dank nest of the GOP (have you been able to tell that I am not a big fan of the Republicans?).  The voters were acting all along like some sort of collective tease, and the Democrats are like the guy who has sunk $50 in drinks for a woman who has no intention of giving him the time of day once she is done with her last margarita.   

For my part, I don’t think traditional Democratic laziness applies this year (though one can only speculate what astonishing result might come about if their traditional voters were normally as engaged in off-year politics as Republican voters usually are), and I don’t think outrage against GOP misrule can be so shallow that it is swept away with the first contrary wind.  I continue to expect the “hurricane” on Tuesday.  I make no alterations to my predictions (how’s that for reckless?), though at the back of my mind I fear I may come a cropper like John Zogby in 2004.  In roughly 48 hours, we will know most of the results for this election, and one side or the other is going be to be feeling extremely silly in their excessive confidence.  However, GOP optimism based on these last-minute polls will seem even sillier if it does not come to pass, since they will have proven to be chasing after momentary mirages.  Those who expect the “hurricane” can at least claim that they were using all of the normal “meteorological” equipment and their best understanding of voting patterns.  At this point, Republican hopes rest on wishful thinking and the desperate clinging to anything that might support their cause.  If they should somehow prevail and even hold the House, they will have done more to make a laughingstock of the idea that democratic elections hold government accountable and guard against the excesses of those in power than anyone else ever could.

Update: For whatever it’s worth, Chuck Todd dug up the generic ballot polling from just before the ’94 election, all of which showed late momentum towards the Democrats that ultimately availed them nothing (or would the result have been even more lopsided had the election occurred earlier?) and one of which even showed a marginal Democratic lead in the week going in to the election.  This is by way of saying that these late polls showing momentum for the incumbent party may be reflecting some real shift of opinion, but there tends to be this sort of late surge for the incumbent.  These polls may therefore be much less significant than a lot of Republican pundits hope that they are.  Plus, a whole raft of new polls just came out confirming the double-digit generic ballot lead and some showing slight or even sizeable leads for Democrats in the supposed comeback races in Rhode Island and Montana.  Ohio and Pennsylvania are clearly all but done.  Allen and Webb are neck and neck with the momentum seeming to favour Webb over the past two weeks.  McCaskill and Talent are likewise virtually tied.  Maryland and Tennessee remain the wild cards, and in spite of what I have said about Tennessee in the past I think Ford may end up hitting a wall because Tennessee is simply such a Republican state just as Steele will hit a will in Maryland coming from the other side.  However, I stick by my prediction of a Dem sweep.

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