The end is nigh, right? After all those hurricains, the Red Sox winning, the whole Ashley Simpson thing - the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are here, and they're all carrying iPod minis.
I've been doing some thinking on polling and the end of the election based on a recent conversation I had with some friends.
Columbia is an incredibly liberal campus. However, most of my friends are relatively conservative, and do not make a good representation of the campus. New York itself is overwhelmingly liberal and in favor of Kerry, in this election especially I have seen the polarization of campus to agreat extent. Perhaps Eighty-Percent favor Kerry, and then maybefive percent are republicans, and the rest Socialists or Libertarians or Greens or Whigs.
As I said, however, many of my friends are in the Republican party here on campus, and on Friday night my Sri Lankan room mate got us to spend four hours trying to convince him who to vote for if he would be able to vote.
"Us" included two fairly liberal girls, a staunch party line conservative, a very moderate conservative who has become somewhat disenfranchised with the Bush administration, and a fiscal conservative who leans left on social issues but does not feel comfortable with several Libertarian goals and therefor remains party-less (if you haven't guessed, thats me).
We argued about every single issue that came up this election. Bythe end, you could tell who everyone was going to vote for - the party line Republican was voting for Bush, the girls for Kerry. The two of us more in the middle were considering handing in ballots with blank entries for the Presidential candidates (Not voting was out of the question for all of us except the Sri Lankan). Of course, I couldn't tell for sure, I don't have the
brain scanner pollsters would like to have.
By the end of the night, the Sri Lankan still couldn't decide.
Ultimately this close election is going to come down to the samething most close elections come down to: who actually shows up to the ballot on election day. We probably won't learn anything we don't know about the favor of the American people from this election.
One important thing will happen, however. Many, many polls are goingto be proved wrong. Whoever wins. There are going to be questions that need to be answered, because the discrepencies between pollsters are too great, because the race is too close, to impossible to call. It is not like this. In reality, if polls were conducted like the census, there would be a clear,
if narrow winner.
Even now, even already. There will be an election winner on November 2nd, and it will be either John Kerry or George Bush. There will be no electoral vote tie. Someone will receive more than 270. There will also be many losers, and those will be the pollsters - because this election will prove, whoever wins, that so many of them are wrong. That they need to open up their methodology, like
Gallup does.
And if this happens, everybody wins.