Polls have had problems since their infancy in American politics. George Gallup made his bones by contradicting the prestigious Literary Digest poll that predicted victory for Kansas governor Alf Landon against FDR in 1936. It seems that the voter turnout of the readership of Literary Digest had virtually nothing in common with the make-up of voters nationwide in that FDR landslide.

Today, if the polls are correct, the Republicans can pack their bags and go home. The NBC/WSJ new poll reports, for example, 16% approval of Congress, a 53/37 advantage for Democrats on the generic Congressional candidate question, and a 57% disapproval rating for President Bush. The NBC/WSJ poll is hardly unique. The RealClear Politics average of many polls shows that 66% of Americans think the country is moving in the wrong direction, and only 29% who think the nation is on the right track. The only good news for Republicans is that an opinion poll never elected anyone.

The Washington Post recently sounded shocked that President Bush and Karl Rove were upbeat about the election. More recently, Karl Rove predicted that the GOP would retain control of Congress. Perhaps Bush and Rove were just trying to paint a smile on a bad situation; however, there was also a piece in Hotline saying that Ken Mehlman’s “Weekly Grassroots Report” was giving him very upbeat information about the Republican GOTV efforts. Eternal GOP optimist Hugh Hewitt also reports that his first-hand observations of GOTV programs in many states leads him to the conclusion that the effort is “vast and energized.”

The question of who will win in 2006 is really the question of who will turn out to vote. This is not a simple question when it comes to off-year elections.

In 2004, a record number of Americans, 126 million, voted in the Bush/Kerry election, 15 million more than had voted in 2000 in the Bush/Gore contest. That increase of 15 million voters in a second-term presidential election is astounding enough in itself, and accounts for more than enough votes to call into question opinion poll predictions for 2006. However, that is a small part of the story.

Consider how different are off-year elections from presidential elections. In 2002, only 89 million people voted in the Congressional election, versus the 126 million who voted two years later. That is a difference of 37 million people versus 2004, and even 22 million fewer people than had voted in 2000. Let’s repeat the key point: there was a difference of almost 40 million voters in elections a mere two years apart, 2004 versus 2002 — that is why a GOTV effort holds the possibility of entirley changing what happens in an off-year election.

So 2006 perhaps comes down entirely to turnout. That explains why the public opinion polls can be so awful, and Bush and Rove so upbeat. That explains the strategic thinking behind the Mark Foley sleaze campaign, and whatever Foley II scandal shows up in the MSM in the next couple of weeks. A key objective of Democratic strategists and their MSM allies will be to suppress Republican turnout.

FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins is credited with formulating as a successful electoral strategy this idea: “tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.” In 2006, should the GOP somehow squeak by and retain control of Congress despite the awful polls, the Karl Rove strategy might be summarized as this: “they can’t turn you out if they don’t turn out.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 8:14 am and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, Polling, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.