BLUE ASH, Ohio — Tens of thousands of Republicans were jammed
into a Friday night rally in the Cincinnati suburb of West Chester,
and Ron Sokol leaned over the crowd-control barricade to talk about
what he’s witnessed during his door-to-door canvassing
expeditions.
“Between now and 2008, I see a world of difference,” Sokol said,
explaining how much more enthusiasm there is for GOP nominee Mitt
Romney — and how much less for Barack Obama. Sokol also mentioned
that Republican get-out-the-vote operations here in Butler County
have been bolstered by an influx of volunteers from around the
country. “I see people from Tennessee, Texas, Indiana —
everywhere.”
Eyewitness accounts like Sokol’s are routinely dismissed by
analysts as mere anecdotes and, even though it is proverbial that
the plural of “anecdote” is data, such tales don’t count
for much among the gurus, soothsayers, and other savants who
arrogate to themselves the mantle of political expertise. But why
bring up Nate Silver at this late stage of the campaign?
The statistical wizard of the New York Times has gone
so far out on a limb with his prediction of an Obama victory that
Silver might as well pull a Joe Namath and guarantee it. Late
Saturday, he peered into his vaunted “Forecasting Model” and raised
the likelihood of the president’s election to 85.1 percent, the
one-tenth of a percentage point being the gimmick by which Silver
provides his guesstimate with the illusion of scientific precision.
Whatever his qualifications as a political analyst, Silver may be
the most successful public-relations man since Eddie Bernays. His
self-created aura of infallibility has made Silver a vital bulwark
of the Obama campaign, which
fed him their internal polling data (and signed him to a
confidentiality agreement) in 2008 when he was openly advocating
the Democrat’s candidacy on his own blog.
These days, as
Mike Flynn of Breitbart.com says, Silver has become “the patron
saint of confirmation bias,” providing statistics that support the
liberal True Believer’s faith in the ultimate triumph of Obama.
Silver has never projected Obama’s chances at worse than 60 percent
and in early September was already rating the president’s
re-election chances at 4-to-1 (see my Sept. 10
column, “Omens of Doom?”). Before Romney’s one-sided romp in
the first debate Oct. 3, Silver had raised Obama’s chances to
precisely 87.1 percent (nearly 7-to-1), but after a nine-day tumble
that took the Democrat’s number down to 61.1 percent — still more
than a 20-point favorite over Romney — Silver announced that the
Republican’s momentum had stopped. This was, perhaps not
coincidentally, the message being trumpeted simultaneously from
Obama HQ in Chicago, and Silver has since then relentlessly raised
the odds in the president’s favor.
This gives hope to the Obamaphiles, although there are frequent
indications that Silver’s fair-sky forecasts haven’t calmed the
jitters among Democrats. For example,
The Nation
has already started claiming “voter suppression” (a favorite
theme of the Left since the contested 2000 election) because Ohio’s
Republican Secretary of State, Jon Husted, issued a directive that
might have the effect of disqualifying some incorrectly filed
provisional ballots. Regardless of the merits of the case, for the
Left to begin playing the “stolen election” card two days ahead of
Election Day suggests a lack of confidence in claims that Obama is
sailing to an easy win in Ohio. One recent poll, showing
Obama ahead by 6 points, had a survey sample composed of 38
percent Democrats and 29 percent Republicans — a D+9 oversample
that actually exceeds the Democrat advantage in partisan ID
reported by 2008 exit polls, when Ohio went to Obama by a 5-point
margin, 52-47, over John McCain. Such implausible oversampling of
Democrats has become routine in polls this year. A
CNN national poll released Sunday had the race tied at 49
percent each for Obama and Romney, but with a D+11 sample that
prompted my Republican operative friend Ali Akbar to remark, “They
might as well be polling San Francisco.”
Akbar stayed up all night Saturday poring over Ohio early-voting
totals, comparing them to previous elections, studying recent
Buckeye State polls, and crunching the numbers before waking me up
before 8 a.m. Sunday to declare, “We’ve got Ohio.” His
analysis of the early-vote numbers and his
interpretation of the latest Columbus Dispatch poll as
bad news for Obama quickly inspired an online buzz among
Republicans who have been worried sick over Ohio. Even at the
mid-October apex of Romney’s surge, the Republican never led the
Real Clear Politics average of polls in this crucial
battleground state. Although Obama’s lead has never been large —
as of Sunday, he led the RCP Ohio average by 2.8 points — it has
been remarkably persistent, prompting much theorizing about the
factors behind it. The economy in Ohio hasn’t been quite as
hard-hit as some other states; unemployment is only 7 percent. Ads
from the Obama campaign have hit Romney hard for his opposition to
the GM and Chrysler bailout, a reasonably popular measure in Ohio,
where auto manufacturing jobs are a vital part of the state’s
economy.
Despite the deluge of attack ads and the worrisome polls, Romney
approaches Election Day within reach of victory in Ohio. The most
recent
Rasmussen poll shows the state a dead heat at 49 each for
Romney and Obama, which means that a strong turnout effort by
Republicans could provide the margin of victory. And the GOP and
its allies have organized a get-out-the-vote blitz of unprecedented
vigor in the Buckeye State this year. In addition to the usual
barrage of pre-recorded “robo-calls” and extensive live
phone-banking, the Romney campaign has done more door-to-door
canvassing here than in any Republican campaign in recent memory.
Romney’s Ohio field director
told the New York Times that they have been “knocking
on 19 times as many doors as Senator John McCain’s campaign did
four years ago.” (This rather important bit of news was buried in
the 57th paragraph of the Times article.) The official
Republican campaign operation is bolstered by similar efforts from
a number of outside groups, among them Americans for Prosperity,
which made more than 23,000 door-to-door contacts statewide
Thursday through Saturday and expected to make thousands more in
the final days of the campaign.
Early Sunday morning, an AFP van pulled up to a motel here in
the Butler County suburbs of Cincinnati. The van driver waited to
load up volunteers for another day of door-knocking. The six
passengers had hit a total of 800 doors Saturday, half of them in
affluent West Chester, the other half in blue-collar Middletown.
One of the teenage volunteers displayed a cellphone photo he had
taken of the front door of a house in a particular rough section of
Middletown. A sign on the door read, “Is there life after death?
Trespass here and find out.”
Was this homeowner a “likely voter”? Is he a Republican or
Democrat? Did Gallup ever call him? How do the sentiments of such
people figure into the calculus of Nate Silver and all the other
political wizards who tell us what’s going to happen on Election
Day?
Questions like that multiply endlessly in the waning hours of a
long campaign. Within 48 hours, we’ll know the answer to the big
question, no doubt to the great relief of the much-harassed
citizens of Ohio.
