Fasten your seatbelts . . .
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Interesting developments on Election Eve. Things are tightening up. Can it really be true that "Democrats' 15-point advantage among white women last month has turned into a 2-point disadvantage"? If so, wow. A few disorganized thoughts follow.
With so many voters using absentee ballots these days, I would like to have a better understanding of how they are accounted for in polls. I wonder how absentees factored into the swing noted above. Those white women who had already cast their ballots presumably responded to poll questions according to how they actually voted. Does that mean, perhaps, that the reported shift represents a much larger shift among white women who will actually visit polling places tomorrow? I'm simply not equipped to judge, but it seems like an interesting question, especially if there are corresponding shifts among groups that disproportionately do not cast absentee ballots.
My friend Dean makes an interesting observation in a recent blog entry:
The pollsters have also yet to devise a way of predicting who’s actually going to show up on Election Day. One poll I read talked to some 1200 registered voters and deemed 1000 of them “likely voters.” Since even a presidential year generates only 60% turnout max, the pollster’s conclusion that over 80% of the people he spoke with are “likely voters” is the professional equivalent of him throwing his hands in the air and saying, “How the hell should I know who’s actually going to vote?”It seems intuitively obvious that pro-Democrat poll responders in a potentially big swing election are going to be less likely to vote than their Republican counterparts. They are younger, less likely to vote absentee, less likely to be habitual voters, etc.
Seattle is not the best place to gauge the national political winds. I'm reminded of how it was watching the 1988 presidential race from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Occasionally there are little reminders of how a profusion of Americans think, like finding out last week that there was some 30-million-member Evangelical coalition that I'd never even heard of—and probably never would have if its leader hadn't had certain predilections.
I think I will be doing some real-time blogging tomorrow night. Could be entertaining.
Labels: television
posted at 4:00 PM
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