The silliness of watching the electoral maps today is driven home by what William Saletan (usually, one of my favorite political commentators) is doing over on Slate. For some reason, he and his staff have taken the position that there's no such thing as a state too close to call; that every state must be awarded to Bush or Kerry, no matter how ambiguous the polls are. So last night, he had Kerry winning with 299 electoral votes. This morning, he moved Ohio and Florida from Kerry to Bush, so Bush is now winning with 286. This may be great for driving traffic to their website but a pretty good argument can be made that it's just exploiting microscopic shifts of polls — some of them, less trustworthy than others — that are all well within the margins of error. In his accompanying notes, he doesn't seem to even think the shifts represent anything significant…but he recolors the map, all the same.
Again, it helps to look back at the 2000 election. A lot of these polls missed predicting the final vote in some states by 3 or 4 points, sometimes more. And today, we're looking at electoral projection maps that award a state to a candidate if he's a tenth of a point ahead in those same polls. Why is it so tough to say that the numbers indicate that either Kerry or Bush could win Ohio or Florida or any of about a half-dozen other states?
Yeah, I know. It's something to do the day before the election. As pundit Jack Germond once said, "We aren't paid to say 'I don't know,' so we have to say something whether we know or not."
My sense is that you can look at this thing two ways. If you take polls as literally as polls ought to be taken — which is to say, as probable not definite gauges — then Bush is a slight favorite. And if you look at the emotion out there and the mobilization of ground forces tomorrow, Kerry has a slight advantage. I think folks on both sides who are fantasizing about landslides are kidding themselves.
Right now, I'm less scared over who will win than I am over how messy it will be with all the charges of vote stealing and vote suppression and machines that misrecord your selections. This past weekend, we turned back the clocks and they said it was the longest night of the year. Just wait 'til tomorrow evening if you want to see a long night.