IN 2000, the polls had Bush winning the popular vote. He went on to lose it by more than 3.5 million votes. In 2004, pollsters on election eve said the race was “too close to call.” The next day, exit polls predicted a comfortable Kerry victory. Then on election night, the Bush-Kerry national popular vote split turned out to be no squeaker, but 51 percent to 48 percent. So are the pollsters all wet?
No, just damp. Both in 2000 and in 2004, most polls, including exit polls, were correct within their margins of error. But let’s all finally understand just how wide those margins are. If a poll predicts a 51-48 percent Bush-Kerry split with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 points, all it is actually predicting is an outcome somewhere in the vast territory between a 9-point lead for Bush (54-45 percent) and a 3-point lead for Kerry (51-48 percent).
Polling, never an exact science, is now an increasingly questionable art. Properly conducted, a poll can capture what 250 million citizens think by interviewing as few as 1,500 people. The key is random sampling: Every voter must have an equal chance of being interviewed.
Unfortunately, many polls this election season were based on smaller-than-ideal samples. With people trying to avoid telemarketers and using call-screening devices, pollsters apparently had more trouble than usual getting people to answer their calls and hence assembling reliable samples and results. To overcome such difficulties will cost more money than some news organizations and other purchasers of polls seem prepared to spend. Instead, this year some news organizations took a cheap short-cut by averaging results from competing polls. This is like trying to build a functional car motor by assembling parts from as many fine or faulty engines of as many different makes as you can find.
The Election Day exit polls were misleading, but so were the forecasts made many months ago (all before Labor Day) by political scientists. The same was true in 2000, when most election-forecasting models had Gore beating Bush handily (winning from 53 percent to 60 percent of the popular vote). This year, several of the most respected models had Bush winning 54 percent or more of the vote, and the median forecast for the seven leading models was 53.8 percent for Bush (including one model that had Bush at 49.9). That is “only” 3 points and change off from Bush’s actual election-night tally; but then a 3-point shift from the actual winner to the second-place challenger would have changed the popular-vote victor in a half-dozen of the presidential elections since 1956.
Different models embody different assumptions and crunch different data, but most include polling results (garbage in, garbage out), presidential approval ratings (subject to wartime rally effects), and various measures of individual or national economic well-being (like the change in real GDP during the first two quarters of an election year, or job growth during the first 3.5 years of a president’s term). In addition, some models incorporate incumbency-advantage measures and other variables.
Still, no model accurately predicted the 2000 presidential race, and none got this year’s right, either. Following the 2000 forecasts, Larry Bartels of Princeton and John Zaller of UCLA combined features of 48 different models, and were thereby able retrospectively to “forecast” the 2000 presidential election within a point or two of the actual results. Summarizing the 2004 forecasts in the October 2004 issue of Political Science and Politics, SUNY-Buffalo’s James Campbell argued that “the forecasts cannot be fairly judged by whether they predicted the candidate who won the election.” After all, “each forecast expects to be wrong to some degree” because “there are unanticipated . . . developments in a campaign that cause votes to shift here or there.” (Memo to my bookie: Pay me no matter what team I bet on next week, especially if anything unexpected happens during the game.)
But the pollsters and professors are models of intellectual rigor next to the media pundits. Remember their endless, self-confident commentaries on the coming Dean-Bush showdown? Or roll the old footage: A “backlash” against 12 years of Republicans in the White House elected Bill Clinton in 1992; but, in 1994, “angry white males” (obviously a backlash against the “backlash”) put Republicans in control of the House for the first time in four decades; then in 1996, “soccer moms” (jilted by the “angry white males”?) reelected Clinton; and since 2000, “deeply divided” Americans have conveniently sorted themselves into “red states” and “blue states” (stay tuned for word on whether “security moms” love “NASCAR dads”).
Sorry, but America is not red vs. blue politically. Every state, from hyper-Democratic New York to hyper-Republican Texas, mixes both red and blue opinions and populations. When you mix red and blue you get purple. The coasts are purple-blue, the South is purple-red, but the country as a whole is increasingly just plain purple.
Take religion. Yes, regular churchgoers (red) favor conservative Republicans while the nonreligious or irreligious (blue) favor liberal Democrats. But, as social science studies going back several decades have documented, about three-quarters of all Americans are somewhat religious or faith-friendly while far from being either orthodox sectarians or orthodox secularists.
As Morris Fiorina of Stanford, Alan Wolfe of Boston College, and other academics have explained, all the chatter about the country’s deep division is exaggerated and oversimplified. America was not “deeply divided” when Kennedy and Nixon split the vote 50-50 in 1960, or when Carter and Ford split it 51-49 in 1976, or when Ross Perot took 18.9 percent in 1992. Today, there are many “red” state and local officials in “blue” states and vice versa, and even with our “deep divisions,” at least one red state flipped blue and a few blue states turned red in this year’s presidential balloting.
The issues that divide Americans in ways that matter politically are not ostensibly either-or issues like abortion that pollsters never tire asking about. Even on abortion and other hot-button issues, opinion is generally more purple than not. For instance, most citizens are pro-life but would allow abortion in cases of rape, incest, and danger to the mother’s life.
Rather, the issues that most powerfully divide Americans, especially in presidential races, are what political scientists term valence issues: ideas, symbols, or conditions that elicit nearly universal public approval or nearly universal public disapproval. Nobody is for bad economic times, political corruption, or irresolute leadership; everybody wants security and warms to compassion. Valence campaigns are about associating your candidate or party with ideas, symbols, or conditions that almost everybody favors, and associating the other candidate or party with things that make almost everybody cringe. Often a single word or phrase will pack a valence punch (“compassionate conservative” or “opportunity society”). Thus, in 2004 the Democratic party platform used the words “strong” and “strength” scores of times, and speakers during the Democratic convention’s first three days (even Jimmy Carter) were scripted to speak them. In the end, Kerry won the televised policy debates but lost the more vital valence war with Bush over leadership.
In this one purple nation under God, the valence issues that matter most politically in presidential elections, and increasingly in other elections as well, are moral values issues. Jeffrey Bell captured this in his 1992 book Populism and Elitism, and every election since has only served to underline his message about “the rise of value politics.”
For instance, this year in Ohio, some African Americans defected to Bush because they perceived him as sharing their concerns about gay marriage.
Most Democratic party elites still don’t appreciate this electoral reality. Instead, they keep trying to sell culturally moderate-to-conservative working-class people, who call themselves middle class and who want wealth for their children, on hating rich Republicans. This tone-deaf and almost comically outdated appeal failed to win them Ohio, a state that has lost 200,000 jobs since Bush became president.
In the 1990s, Democrats wised up on crime and a few other issues that had cost them dearly, and not only in the South. But the party’s leaders have yet to realize that their liberal-radical celebrity elites and extremists tend to be even less appealing to purple Americans than are the comparable right-wing Republican crew. An old Philadelphia Democratic committeeman once put it this way: “I don’t like [Moral Majority fundamentalist preacher] Jerry Falwell or [Grateful Dead drug-culture rocker] Jerry Garcia, but if I had to pick one Jerry to watch my grandkids, I’d sure pick Falwell.”
Kerry the Catholic altar boy could not muster a sincere-sounding moral lather even when speaking about his faith and how it informed his views on poverty in America. Purple America does not want proselytizing public leaders, but it is more inspired than offended by politicians who do “God talk.” Nevertheless, the Democratic party elite continues to regard purple prose about the Almighty as a no-no. Unless that changes, the Democratic party, bred and led mainly by staunchly secular pro-choice liberals, will die before 2020, and there will be no resurrecting it.
It’s true of course that, had 70,000 or so votes switched in Ohio, we would probably now be contemplating a President-elect Kerry. For that matter, Democrats still console themselves with the fact that had a mere 19,500 votes spread across 13 House districts shifted from Republicans to Democrats in 1994, there might still be a Speaker Foley. Presumably that type of thinking will cease before the twentieth anniversary of Republican control.
If Democrats want to win in 2006 and 2008, they really don’t need to engage in any soul-searching or blood-letting. Rather, they need to catch up with Republicans, who are simply better at courting base voters while being, or at least sounding, purple to most Americans on many or most issues.
Here is one practical way for Democrats to pave a purple-nation path to victory: Try cultivating and running some religiously alive and/or pro-life but progressive Democrats against vulnerable Senate Republicans in 2006; then try giving such politicians prime-time speaking slots at the 2008 Democratic convention, just as Republicans invited several pro-choice politicians to deliver major speeches at their 2004 convention. Otherwise, the only purple Democrats will get is purple with envy over continued Republican wins in close national elections.
Contributing editor John J. DiIulio Jr. is coauthor with James Q. Wilson of American Government: Institutions and Policies, ninth edition (Houghton-Mifflin, 2004).
