A Week Out

With only a week to go before election day polling has gone from being unreliable to full on propaganda. This isn't unusual, polls typically tighten up and fluctuate the closer it gets to election day as pollster either try and produce polls to help a particular candidate or they try and get their polls more accurate so that in the end they will look legitimate. Normally these polls are a good way to track momentum (even if the numbers themselves are wrong) but there are two reasons why these polls may be less helpful than usual this year.

The first one is the increase in popularity of early voting. A late breaking trend in the polls doesn't really matter if most of the ballots have already been cast. I heard that 75% of Colorado voters would participate in some kind of early voting. If this is true, it would clearly help Senate candidate Ken Buck who has been trying to beat back withering personal attacks from Bennett and his supporters. he needs the vote to happen ASAP before the attacks diminish his profile with the voters. On the other hand, the early voting phenomenon would seem bad news for Tom Tancredo, who has been gaining late traction as a third party candidate for Governor. He needs more time to get people to abandon Republican corpse Dan Maes and not just vote for him because he's on the top line. I don't know if that 75% will turn out to be accurate but if it is, it could swing two races in opposite directions.

The second reason is how the polls are taken. Specifically the samples. Most of the polls I've seen recently that show Democratic momentum have confusing samples. Mid term elections have traditionally shown much lower turnout than Presidential years yet these polls are showing Democratic turnout not only matching 2006 mid term elections but also matching the 2008 Presidential election turnout. Given the participation of minorities and first time voters in the historic Obama election, I find it very hard to believe that that is possible. There is no way there will be so many first time voters who get caught up in a midterm election. The same polling companies that are predicting this liberal turnout also have polls showing a massive enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats with the GOP far more (60%-27% in one poll I saw) enthusiastic then the Dems. According to these polls, the youth army Obama relied on not only to vote but to work the campaigns seem to have packed up shop for this go around. One of the polls has to be wrong. If there is that wide an enthusiasm gap, then Democratic turnout can't possibly be as high the fervor in 2008 or even the turnout for the Foley/Pelosi elections in 2006.

Knowing the political leanings of the polling media, we can safely assume that the enthusiasm polls are right, making the sample sizes the culprit for fraudulent polls. Having said that, it's possible that the turnout does come in higher than anticipated. When Obama was elected, we were all told that he had motivated a new generation of young civic activists who would be involved in every election from here on out. If that's true and all the young, minority and first time voters come out to vote, then Obama can truly be called a transformational figure as the youth vote has been notoriously hard to keep motivated past any one election cycle. If the they don't come out though, that'll be the final proof needed to know that Obama the Transformational Liberal Icon is nothing but pure fantasy.