The last few presidential elections, I spent a lot of time watching (and not necessarily believing) the polls. My philosophy was to more or less double the margin of error and take it more literally. In other words, if a given survey had a three point margin of error, I considered it meaningless if the candidates were less than six points apart. I'm not sure this was statistically sound but it saved a lot of wear and tear on my emotions, fretting when my guy was two points down, getting my hopes up when he was three ahead, having them dashed when he then fell four, etc.
This time out, I'm lost. The polls are all over the place and even within one survey, the national numbers sometimes paint a very different picture than if you go state-by-state. We also have some pockets of unprecedented new voter registration, and that may render some of the old polling models inoperative. I once heard some member of the Gallup family say that the main reason that some polls miscalled elections was that they were based on obsolete profiles of what constituted a Likely Voter.
I don't get that there's a lot of enthusiasm out there for either candidate. There's a lot of enthusiasm for winning…and since we're stuck with the guys we're stuck with, we'll pretend our guy is a great leader and that we have unwavering confidence in him. But I think if you could give a massive dosage of Sodium Pentathol to the electorate, most Republicans would admit they wish they had a guy who could speak better English and hadn't led us into a dual quagmire of Iraq and The Deficit. And most Democrats would admit that they wish they had a guy who could utter a clear, declarative sentence and offer solutions that didn't come with so many disclaimers attached.
I have no idea who's going to win, and I suspect that, more so than usual, the people who are paid loads of money to know who's going to win don't know who's going to win. I'm also real sick of this election.
The last few days, I've written a lot about the Late Night battles, and had at least twenty calls from friends and reporters who wanted to discuss it. When I reached a lull in the topic, I went to catch up on all the political websites I routinely browse…and I couldn't face them. The Leno-O'Brien situation is trivial and silly and it was such a nice vacation from the Bush-Kerry one that I didn't want to go home.