The purveyors of conventional wisdom offered two competing assumptions about how voters would behave on Tuesday.
Either Barack Obama would underperform polls because of secret white racism or voters would be so excited about Obama that they would turn out in record numbers and carry him into the electoral stratosphere.
Both theories turned out to be bunkum.
With a seven-point national win for Obama, we saw that sensible pollsters like Scott Rassmussen and the folks at TIPP polling just about nailed the final number. Thank goodness they did, thereby sparing Americans from being lectured about their vestigial hatred of blacks by the media and academic race-grievance industry. Sorry, Al Sharpton.
But we also see why so many polls were so wrong.
Republicans and Democrats figured that with perhaps 5 million more registered voters and 20 million more residents of these fruited plains, that the record-breaking turnout of 2004 – some 122 million voters – would be itself shattered.
It made sense. You had a stark contrast between the candidates, a lot on the line, and more media coverage than ever. Republicans were betting that 130 million turnout was the floor. Democrats hinted that they thought it might be much higher as black voters and young people turned out in droves for Obama.
We won’t know the final total until after they’ve scrounged the last votes out of Yukon-Koyukuk County, Alaska, and sorted out the car crash of a Senate election between Norm Coleman and Al Franken in Minnesota, but it looks like turnout was a disappointment.
Political scientists are estimating total voters anywhere from 123 million and 133 million, but with 97 percent of precincts in, there still hadn’t been 121 million votes counted. Their final total will go beyond what we saw for Bush-Kerry, but as a percentage and as compared with expectations it was a flop.
The always imperfect but irresistible exit polls tell us that 13 percent of voters were black as compared with 12 percent in 2004. Young voters accounted for 18 percent of the electorate, as compared with 16 percent last time around.
In fact, the exit polls, which oversample Democrats, who seem to have more tolerance for people with clipboards than Republicans do, look mostly similar to the 2004 election.
So who stayed home?
I suspect that it’s the same people who claimed to be undecided until the final day of the election – who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for either another Republican after the mess of the past eight years or for a 47-year-old former community organizer.
President-elect Obama’s challenge now is to reach out to the missing 10 million voters.
Because they’re the ones who decide elections, even when they don’t vote.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
