While I was channel surfing earlier this week, I happened to catch Chris Matthews on MSNBC. While I generally try to avoid infomercials, I paused long enough to see what he was thinking. Actually, I guess I didn’t pause long enough, because he actually showed no sign of intelligent thought during the time that I watched. He was using some of the current polls showing Romney’s slipping popularity to proclaim the presidential contest decided, the end of the GOP, and the inevitability of Liberal ideology rising to world domination.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Scientific investigation can be useful in discovering truth, but if you’ve already locked your mind on what you believe truth to be, then the chief tool of science, the disproving of hypotheses, is lost to truth’s evil twin, propaganda. Like the argument on climate change, beware when proponents attempt to shut down the debate with contentions that “the science is settled”. True scientists retain their inquisitive minds, and realize that science is seldom so easily settled. Putting “scientific polls” in the hands of political hacks, is a little like giving the knowledge of chemistry to Al Qaeda; they’ll only use it to blow stuff up.
I’ve done enough course work in statistics, and seen enough elections that don’t really jive with the pre-election polls, to understand that these polls are not the high tech crystal balls that the intellectually lazy would like them to be. Like picking the Superbowl champ, it becomes easier as the season goes on; but in the end, you still have to play the game, and anything can happen… ask Joe Namath! Scientifically, polls drawing their samples from the same population should be within each others’ margin of error. When they are not, someone has done something wrong. That is understandable; the highly charged political and commercial world of polling is hardly a pristine laboratory. The average deviation of the actual election from September’s Gallup polls is about 6.4 points, clearly sometimes far above the margin of error. That doesn’t mean the poll was inaccurate, just not predictive… then again, it could be that the poll was wrong to begin with. If the assumptions of the poll are wrong, the poll is not measuring the population that will decide the contest… nothing wrong with the math, just the mathematician!
Correlation does not insinuate causality. We like to believe that our polling is a snapshot of political opinion, but without control groups and double blinds it’s entirely possible that the polls help create the results they predict. That’s a little scary, especially when so many of the polling organizations are hardly neutral politically.
Given all this, there seems to be enough consensus to assume that the President has an advantage right now, especially if the election were held via phone calls. It’s hard to measure voter intensity, and who will actually get to the polls. “Man on the street” interviews where voters can’t answer the simplest of political questions probably elicit the same response from us all: “That guy’s vote counts the same as mine?” In the past solace could be found in the understanding that morons are often the least motivated to vote; but with early voting coupled with the underrated strategy of “community organizing”, a lack of voter intensity can be somewhat compensated for.
With the state of the nation, one has to ask a question the polls don’t answer… why? There are of course the faithful base, Chris Matthews and his kin, faithful followers of the Cult of Obama; these would vote for the President over Ghandi or Jesus Christ (okay, maybe not Ghandi). Even George McGovern had a few votes. But these are not nearly enough to give him the edge, as dependable as they may be due to their political ideology. There are a few more who voted Obama the first time through and can’t bring themselves to admit they made a mistake. These are the “double-downers”, hoping against hope that just a few trillion more will miraculously prove they were right all along. In poker parlance, we call that being “on tilt”, where making a bad play makes you play even worse. Some have postulated, I believe correctly, that the vast majority of those leaning toward the President, are actually those leaning away from the Governor; the “Not-Romney” voters. If you look at the graphs of popularity for Romney and Obama they are a totally different shape. Obama’s is highly polarized with many people liking him, many disliking him, and few in the middle. Romney’s conversely is flat. A few people hate him, fewer love him, and the majority are sort of neutral. From the beginning of the primary, the electorate, uninspired by Romney, has looked for someone else. Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, even Ron Paul… each shared short lived popularity spikes in the polls based less on their own qualifications than on the the possibility of their viability as an alternative to the unspectacular but steady Mitt Romney. In each case, Romney was able to find a way, often a quite calculated way, to dispatch the contender and move on to the next in line. It would appear that President Obama is the next in line. Whether the same dynamics that worked for Romney in the primary will persist for the general election is very much a question; but President Obama can ask the list of fallen Republicans how tenuous that “Not-Romney” vote can be.
IMHO: If science teaches us anything, it teaches us to open our eyes, and not just blindly accept the propaganda of political operatives using pseudo-science to shut down debate, or over-simplify reality. The election remains a choice of futures. The Dems have used a Mike Tyson approach, trying to knock out his opponent in the first round. This was unsuccessful, and one wonders about the President’s political stamina going forward. Romney may have been using the Ali “rope-a-dope” strategy, biding his time, incurring no real damage, conserving his resources, letting his opponent wear himself down… and then, bam! Of course it may be that Obama’s campaign still has something left in the tank, or that Romney just can’t punch. In any event, we’re about to find out; it’s the final round. Both candidates are considered extremely flawed. Besides their base their constituency seems to be made up chiefly of the “Not” vote… “Not Romney” for Obama, and “Not Obama” for Romney. The final decision won’t be a case of someone rising to the top, so much as being the last man standing. A flawed President, a divided country, another four years… let me know when to cheer.
