October 28, 2000

The good news? ... that Bush is, well, 3 or 4 points ahead - that is, well within the day-by-day fluctuations of voter sentiment, as measured even in stable, well-behaved polls like the Reuters/Zogby tracking poll.  (The CNN/Gallup tracker, traditionally the poll to watch, has become so embarrassing due to its huge day-to-day swings that even CNN coughs in their collective hands when they put it on the screen.)  With even the most stable polls wavering by a point or two a day, today's polling numbers give only a very general idea of where the race will be on a week from Tuesday - when the one poll is taken that actually matters.  For all practical purposes, an objective observer would have to say that the race is dead even, with the most marginal, razor-thin advantage (at the moment) for Bush. 

I am not required to be a purely objective observer.  So I'll spend the rest of this space pointing out some underlying factors that favor Gore.  If you want factors favoring Bush, do it on your own keyboard and post it on your own website.

First, the Nader factor.  Ralph Nader, not to put too fine a point on it, has become a legend in his own mind (and, unfortunately, in the minds of a few percent of the electorate).  The blunt truth is that his contributions to American public life - which are many and substantial - lie years in the past.  The Corvair has long vanished from the roads, and the PIRGs are long established.  Somewhere along the line Nader sank to the level of gadfly; he has now sunk further, to the level of spoiler.   His argument, that of cranks in every age, is that if we just make things bad enough they will magically turn better.  Elect Bush, he implies, and tens of millions of Americans will recoil in horror and turn to the Green Party.  To us mere mortals, it would seem better to recoil in horror before the damage is done, but that is not how self-appointed saints reason.

Of Nader's 4 percent of so of the vote, a good many probably wouldn't vote at all otherwise, so for practical purposes they are a wash.  (If they are young and idealistic, maybe a vote for Nader is better than not voting; I was young myself, eons ago, if never all that idealistic.)  Others are Perot types, who live to vote for third parties, no matter what - if anything - they stand for.  A few are even moderate Republicans who would otherwise hold nose and vote for Bush.  Alas, too many are liberal Democrats who would otherwise hold nose and vote for Gore. 

But the (relatively) good news, in relating the polls today to the prospective vote on November 7, is that a percent or so of Nader voters - more in Nader-heavy states like Oregon and Minnesota - are likely to hold their nose and vote for Gore after all, in the end, when they're alone in the voting booth with their conscience and the prospect of four years of George W. Bush.

So give Gore a hidden percentage point or so, above what is shown in the polls, for those Nader supporters who will allow their hearts to phone-a-friend to their heads.    In this respect, the cynical move of a GOP group in running pro-Nader ads was done far too early; in the last 48 hours it might have been a blindsider; done now it only reminds everyone of just who really stands to gain from votes for Nader.

Now, to the Electoral College.  In the abstract, our late-medieval system of choosing a President ought to favor Bush - states with small populations are overrepresented, and most of those states are in Bush country, especially the militia belt of the mountain-desert interior West.

In the real world, however, Bush is going to carry those states by wide margins - and 70 percent of the vote, in a given state, delivers no more electoral votes than does 50.001 percent.  Every vote above break-even-plus-one, in a state like Utah, is a vote that Bush racks up in the national tally but that does him no good at all in the Electoral College.  The supreme example is Texas, hardly a low-population state, but one that Bush may well carry by 70-30.  Gore, to be sure, will also have a "wasteful" excess of votes in states like New York, but not nearly so many of them as Bush will have in his base states.)

The art of gerrymandering is, in essence, to concentrate the other side's vote into overwhelming margins in a few district, while spreading your own vote into narrow margins in a lot of districts.  In those terms, the Electoral College has quite by accident been gerrymandered - in Gore's favor.  If Bush wins the popular vote by less than about a percentage point, chances are good that Gore will carry the electoral vote.

In Florida, three of four most recent polls have shown Gore ahead.  Gore also leads - by razor-thin margins - in Pennsylvania and Michigan.  But these are also big union states, so the unions' get-out-the-vote efforts should provide Gore with a modestly favorable turnout skew in both of them.  So even as Bush is narrowly favored in the national vote numbers, Gore is narrowly favored in these three crucial states.

Then there is California.  A month ago this looked to be a state where Gore would "waste" a couple of million votes over what he needed to win.  Since then Bush has invested great resources here - without, however, coming close enough in any poll to be considered really competitive.  About one percentage point of Bush's entire national polling numbers comes from narrowing Gore's margin in California ... without narrowing it enough.

None of these factors, by itself, can account for more than about a single percentage point.  Even taken all together, they can only account for perhaps three points, maybe four.  But in this race, three or four points could make all the difference ...  

-- Rick Robinson

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Last revised 11/07/2006 ... by RM Robinson

Email me: Lyonesse@compuserve.com

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