I'll not insult your intelligence by thinking I can convince you at this late date to vote my way…or that you need me to remind you to go vote at all. I will suggest that if you go vote Tuesday, you prepare yourself for a very long line at the polling place. I think we're about to see a record turnout, to the extent that polls will be ordered to remain open long after the official closing times. The fact that many of them will also be cluttered with observers and cameramen and exit pollsters will further add to the chaos, and make many of us think we were lunkheads for not going the absentee route.
Unless the exit polls indicate some tremendous landslide, I doubt we'll know who won on Tuesday evening. Certainly, there will be whole precincts where the machines go kablooey or the ballots mysteriously don't line up with the candidates or even show all their names, and you'll see people swearing they touched the button for Bush but the machine registered a vote for Michael Dukakis…or something. Whatever, it's going to be messy.
Maybe it's just me, but I sure get the impression that the pollsters — the non-partisan ones, at least — are a lot less sure of their projections this year than usual. An unprecedented number of ballots…more new registered voters than usual…technological changes like cell phones and early voting and so forth…if I were a pollster, I'd sure think this was a good time to not go too far out on a limb. These folks deal in models that are based in part on previous elections, and we've never had an election quite like this one. Perhaps their surveys really are calling it this close to 50-50, but there may also be a little "playing it safe" in there.
For some reason, I was reminded today of the joke about Hubert Humphrey in 1968 when he was running against Nixon. He and his wife actually went to bed before the results were all in and — and this part begins the joke — he turned to her and said, "Well, Muriel. Tomorrow morning when you wake up, you'll get to make love with the president-elect of the United States." The next morning, she woke him up and asked, "How does this work? Do I go to Dick's house or does he come over here?"
Someone wrote me and asked, "If Bush wins another four years, who or what will you think was responsible?" In that event, I'd blame the entire Democratic Party for even fielding a candidate. Because if Bush ran unopposed, he'd lose for sure.