Analogies from sports are often employed to describe the
competitive clash of politics and I’ve used a baseball
metaphor myself to describe the current presidential campaign.
However, my eyebrows were raised when I learned that Internet
poll guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight (538 = total number of Electoral
College votes) comes to political punditry from a background of
baseball statistics. (See the Newsweek
article here.)
The real problem with this is that, unlike the cold reality of
baseball statistics, campaign polls are a flawed instrument that
yield only an approximation of public opinion at any given moment.
Pollsters like to say they provide a “snapshot” of current opinion,
and the snapshots are often quite blurry.
Also, unlike a baseball game, the outcome of elections is
dependent upon the reactions of the spectators.
The results on Nov. 4 may very well match Silver’s projections
(currently 295 EVs for Obama, 243 for McCain), but this is merely
the extrapolation of current numbers over an imaginary 90-day
event-free path to Election Day, which cannot be assumed.
INDEED, IF WE COULD could extrapolate the current trend,
John McCain would be a shoo-in for the White House. Silver’s poll
“super tracker” shows that, since peaking near plus-5 on June 19,
Obama has declined to plus-2 in less than six weeks. If the “super
tracker” were a popular-vote measurement, and this six-week trend
were projected over the next 13 weeks, then Obama would be minus-4
on Election Day — with McCain getting 52 percent of the
two-candidate total to Obama’s 48 percent. Such a popular-vote
margin for McCain would be as large as Bush’s 2004 win over Kerry,
and would almost certainly mean McCain topping the 270 EVs needed
for victory.
That’s only an extrapolation, however, and cannot account for
whatever real-world campaign events will transpire between now and
Nov. 4. The most likely scenario is for a seesaw struggle all the
way to Election Day, with Obama winning by a narrow margin. Yet a
complete electoral meltdown is possible for either candidate.
(Possible, I said, which isn’t the same thing as
likely.)
What team Obama is counting on is that the situation will remain
at least competitive for their candidate going into Nov. 4, so that
their campaign’s acknowledged superiority in get-out-the-vote
operations will make the decisive difference. Yet there are any
number of scenarios that might render that advantage moot, should
Obama suffer some scandal or blunder that causes his support to
collapse in the interim. If Halloween arrives with Obama so
unpopular that he’s on the losing end of a double-digit poll
disadvantage, all the canvassing and phone-banking in the world
won’t elect him.
That’s exactly why the fallibility of poll data puts an asterisk
beside any summer projection of November results. Early polls have
traditionally favored Democrats by margins that fail to predict the
final result. Michael Dukakis led by 17 points in July 1988 and got trounced
on Election Day. The July polls could not predict events like the
Democrat’s idiotic tank ride or his politically tone-deaf response
to Bernie Shaw’s rape question.
For more than a week after Obama’s return from his nine-day
foreign trip, Nate Silver resisted the evidence that the momentum
of the election was swinging against the Democrat. Yet events were
intervening to disrupt the statistical clarity.
THE McCAIN CAMPAIGN had rolled out ads that hit hard on the
energy issue, Obama’s canceled visit to wounded troops, and the grandiosity of his Berlin speech. An admitted Obama
supporter, Silver evidently shares the campaign’s view that these
were unfair “attacks,” and last week declared that the “decline in Obama’s
numbers…has halted — and has possibly begun to reverse
itself.”
Instead, the decline continued. The day after Silver’s
declaration, Gallup’s Gallup’s daily tracking poll showed the race
deadlocked at 44 percent for each candidate, and by Monday, the
Rasmussen daily tracking poll showed McCain inching
ahead — “the first time McCain has enjoyed even a statistically
insignificant advantage of any sort since Obama clinched the
Democratic nomination on June 3.”
Silver was compelled to admit the latest polls “indicate some tightening
in the race” — quite an understatement, considering that Obama had
seen a one-time 9-point Gallup lead evaporate in the span of a week.
Silver’s concept can be statistically predicted based on past
performance. However, the notion of Obama’s inevitability is based
on the narrative of his primary campaign as a glorious triumph.
That narrative, however, fails to account for contradictory
evidence: The overconfidence that led Obama to vacation in the Virgin Islands while Hillary was
stumping all over Pennsylvania, his weak performance in the April
15 debate, and the late-primary fade that left his
pledged delegate count 300 short of a nominating majority
Does the past predict the future? As Republicans this week
brandish tire gauges as a symbol of Obama’s
clueless claim that tire
pressure is as important to the gas crunch as increased oil
production, the question Silver should be asking is, “Which past
are we talking about?”
Obama may yet win the election, but only if he can avoid the
historic bumbles that have hurt so many of his Democratic
predecessors. So far, the rookie’s prospects aren’t promising.
