Of the taking of polls there is no end, particularly in a presidential election year. Although it’s considered the better part of wisdom to feign at least a healthy disregard, if not an active disdain, for the preponderance of polling, the truth is that political junkies couldn’t live without a steady dose of polls.
The more obnoxiously pretentious a pundit (patron saints of pretentious punditry: Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter and Anna Quindlen) the more likely it is that he or she routinely decries the ubiquitousness of polls. The common lament from the smugly high-minded is that the media’s fascination with polls gives too much weight to the horse-race aspect of a campaign, at the expense of the important and weighty discussions of policy for which voters presumably hunger.
Too much weight to the horse race?! Imagine for a moment a presidential campaign bereft of polls and the horse-race atmosphere they so helpfully foster. Venture a thought as to the dreariness – the despair, actually – of having to actually pay attention to a scripted bore like John Kerry drone on and on about jobs and education, or an oratorical disaster like George W. Bush mangle even the simplest of sentences.
Too much weight to the horse race? Would anyone even pretend to read books like Theodore White’s Making of the President series if they were simply compilations of stump speeches and position papers?
Richard Ben Cramer wrote arguably the best book ever on presidential politics, a thousand-page opus on the 1988 campaign called What It Takes: The Way to the White House, and it’s such a great read precisely because he knew better than to indulge in detailed analysis of tax plans and trade initiatives.
All the books worth reading on presidential elections – the efforts by the aforementioned White and Cramer as well as titles like Chester, Hodgson and Page’s An American Melodrama; Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 1972; Michael Lewis’s Trail Fever – are heavy on the dramatics and blessedly light on the kind of stuff that keeps policy wonks up at night. The interest is in the narrative, the story line, the plot, if you will.
Sure, the readers of the best campaign books come away possessing a not insubstantial acquaintance with the candidates’ positions on at least the major issues of the day, but the story is driven by the personalities, the gossip, the constant and obsessive polling by news organizations and the campaigns themselves – in other words, it all comes down to the much-maligned horse race.
So banish the guilt and have fun tracking the candidates’ ups and downs, knowing that the very columnists and commentators who bemoan the polls are the ones who spend hour after hour dissecting the latest numbers, all the while longing for release of the next day’s tracking surveys.
Poll watchers have a lot to chew over this year, with the Bush-Kerry race about as close a contest as we’ve had in recent memory. For a daily read on the status of the race, there’s RasmussenReports.com with its seven-day-a-week tracking poll. On Tuesday, June 22, Kerry held a three-point lead over Bush in the Rasmussen poll, but for months now the lead has been changing hands every few days, with neither candidate pulling ahead by anything approaching a substantial margin.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted June 17-20 has Kerry up by four points, 48-44, while an IBD/TIPP poll taken June 14-19 gives Bush a 44-41 lead and a poll by the Pew Research Center taken between June 3 and June 13 gives Bush a two-point edge, 48-46.
The only blip on the fairly stable polling radar screen came last week when the Harris Poll’s latest numbers showed Bush with a ten-point lead, 51-41. Harris, as New York Post columnist John Podhoretz noted, has historically been seen as skewing liberal, which makes its newest survey all the more noteworthy.
Now isn’t this a whole lot more interesting than reading blather from either party about taxes or the environment?