Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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No More Pollster Jokes

Friday October 27, 2000

The six major tracking polls, with one exception, are all trending toward Bush. When five of the six polls are trending toward Bush this is known in the media as their being "all over the place." When one poll has Gore leading by two percentage points for two days in a row this is called, "GORE EXTENDS LEAD!"

To take a look at the national tracking polls through last night go HERE.

More and more evidence of Democratic hand wringing is being reported. In California, writes Todd Purdum in the NY Times, Democrats' private polls show the race even closer than a Public Policy Institute poll which shows Gore's lead down to just five points.

Purdum quotes Paul Maslin, "a California-based Democratic pollster for Governor Davis and other national figures. '[The Republicans] have more money, their base has more energy and we have a drag from Nader.'"

The whole Nader thing has taken a remarkable turn. Eighteen months ago, remember, we members of the National Punditry were all holding forth on the damage Pat Buchanan running as an independent might or might not do to Bush's candidacy. We have the answer: Zero.

Nader, however, continues to hold on to his three to five (in some states double digit) percent of the vote. Almost none of that comes out of Bush's hide. Democrats spent a good part of Wednesday breathing heavy sighs of relief as they worked the phones to make sure everyone in Your Nation's Capital knew a pro-Nader group had decided to withdraw some newspaper ads in California.

To see a list of states in which the Associated Press feels Ralph Nader might make a difference, go HERE.

That sound you heard Wednesday night was about 137 sets of teeth gritting in Nashville as the Gore campaign brain trust watched newscast after newscast after newscast of Bill Clinton doing a stand-up comedy routine with Robert De Niro at Hillary's birthday party in New York City.

While Al Gore was trying to get voters' attention by saying horrible things about George W., Bill Clinton was getting the television time trying to say "fuhgettaboudit" like a New Yorker - or at least like Hollywood writers think New Yorkers say it.

Before I dug my tuxedo out of the closet for an Inaugural Ball I thought I should speak with Bill McInturff - pollster, Mullings sponsor, and long-time friend - about the issue of "voter intensity."

Bill thinks the intensity of the GOP vote as being reported these days may be overstated. Bill's basic thesis is Republican voters tend to be somewhat better educated, and tend to have somewhat higher incomes which means they tend to pay somewhat more attention to things like elections somewhat earlier than Democrats.

Like all pollsters, Bill permits himself a certain amount of latitude in the specificity of his statements.

He suggests, however, that Democratic intensity tends to begin to build later than that of GOP voters - sometime within the last six to eight days.

He reminded me of 1998, when African-American voters were showing much higher vote intensity at the end of the campaign than were Republican voters. The result, indeed, was much higher-than-usual turnout in traditionally black areas with the ensuing - and surprising - loss of GOP seats in the U.S. House.

To that end, Curtis Wilke, writing in the Boston Globe says, "a top [Gore] campaign official said yesterday that a recorded message from Clinton would be used in millions of telephone calls to rally black voters across the country in the final days."

Take a look at one of the funniest Mullings "Catchy Caption of Day" entries HERE.

One hopes reporters will hound the Gore campaign into making public any and all scripts which the Campaigner-in-Chief is recording to help Gore turn out the African-American vote.

Senior staffers at the National Republican Congressional Committee and its chairman, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) are more sanguine, if not yet ebullient, about their chances of the GOP hanging on to the U.S. House. With recent fortunes turning toward the GOP in many of the battleground districts, they now think it is the Democrats which have the uphill climb.

On that topic, AP Senior Congressional Correspondent Dave Espo wrote last night that, "Democrats have been making it clear for weeks, if not longer, their desire to pick a fight with Republicans. The GOP had slipped each punch thus far through careful, quiet negotiations with the White House on several bills, giving in to Clinton's demand for a national drunken driving standard, for example, and agreeing to a new conservation effort."

This could be pretty neat: Barbara Marumoto, a Mullings reader from Hawaii, wrote: "We have invented the new Republican Victory sign - three fingers (index, middle, and ring) up to form a W instead of a V." Go ahead. Try it.

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