Nickelodean points to US election winner

ALL THE SIGNS point to a victory by the Democrat Kerry/Edwards ticket over the incumbent Republican Bush/Cheney administration in the US presidential election being held today. Although the final polling numbers show both sides locked in a statistical dead heat, there exist good reasons to conclude that the challengers will beat Shrub & Co.

What are these signs? Let's start with the poll recently conducted by the children's cable TV Nickelodean channel. That online poll correctly picked the winners in all four previous US presidential elections, and this year the kids chose Kerry over Bush by a margin of 57% to 43%.

Then there's the loss of the Washington Redskins football team in last Sunday's game. The party in power has never won a presidential election in years when the Redskins lost their last game before the election.

The upset victories by the Boston Red Sox baseball team in the recent league pennant series -- where Boston defied history by winning after having fallen behind the New York Yankees 3-0, the first time ever -- and in the subsequent World Series, also provided an encouraging kick for the Democrat campaign -- Kerry is a Senator from Massachusetts and the Red Sox had never won the World Series for 86 years, since 1918.

Wall Street is favoring victory for the challengers, too. The October performance of the Dow Jones stock average has historically indicated a defeat for the incumbent administration if it declined by over one-half of a percentage point. This October the Dow average fell by 0.52%.

But all these signs are maybe just coincidences, and this year might be the year that breaks all of their pseudo-predictive power in elections (except that Nickelodeon children's poll - kids can be perceptive). A better grounded approach might be to look closely at the late polls.

Or rather, not look at them, actually, since with a few minor exceptions they are all saying the same thing -- that the outcome of this election is simply too close to call. They all have both parties virtually tied, with 47%, 48%, 49% of the popular vote and only a few percentage points difference between them and those differences within the polling margins of error. So it is what the pollsters call a statistical dead heat.

This ostensible closeness of the election has raised a legitimate worry that this US presidential election might not be clearly decisive for one side or the other, especially in terms of the results in the mathematics of the Electoral College votes that actually decide which party's ticket wins the US presidency and vice presidency. Very close popular votes in any of several States could again throw the election into the courts, as happened in Florida in the 2000 election... with unfortunate results.

That last election wound up in legal maneuvering that eventually reached the US Supreme Court, where a narrow majority of Republican judges voted their ideology to appoint Dubya Bush as President (thus forever stunting their own stature as Supreme Court Justices in the eyes of historians). Thus deprived of a thorough recount in Florida in 2000, Democrat Al Gore lost the US presidency by 567 popular votes, even though he actually won the national popular vote by a margin of over 500,000. No one wants this to happen again because this time both parties have enlisted over 10,000 lawyers, ready to file lawsuits that could drag on for months on end.

The mechanics of that arcane US method of selecting its chief executives called the Electoral College are too complex to describe in detail here, but Professor Andrew Tannenbaum (who wrote MINIX, which inspired a young graduate student named Linus Torvalds to begin writing the Linux OS) has an excellent explanation (and a lot more) at his Electoral-Vote website, here.

However, despite the closeness of the final pre-election opinion polls, I'm going to call this election for Kerry/Edwards to beat Bush/Cheney by more than enough votes in enough States to avoid any repeat of 2000. And I'll explain why I believe Kerry will win it by a substantial margin.

My reasons for predicting a solid victory for the Democrats, Kerry and Edwards, are half a dozen factors where I reckon election pollsters have failed to capture the sentiments of all the voters whose choices will be tallied, hopefully within the next few days, not over several months.

Low polling response
The polling firms don't go out of their way to talk about it but they do admit that only 20% to 40% of the people they've contacted this election have been willing to talk with them about their plans to vote this year. This is a low percentage of responses compared with past elections, the reasons for which are unclear. But in a newly afraid America, what with US Patriot Act infringements on the Bill of Rights plus the nasty habits of right-wing zealots to attack dissent as somehow unpatriotic, it's not too surprising that many voters may be loathe to give their opinions.

Inherent polling biases
Some polling operations are run by major media conglomerates, those same media firms that have acted as virtual cheerleaders for this current US administration. If they want to continue consolidating their marketshare with the collusion of the current FCC and Congress, they certainly have a vested interest in making this present administration look unbeatable, or at least not about to get thrown out of office by its opposition. In addition, some of the non-partisan polling companies employ statistical filters that tend to discount the likelihoods of minorities and youthful voters to actually turn out to vote on election day, skewing results. As it happened in the 2000 election, Bush went into election day enjoying a 5% lead in many polls, but Gore received about 50% of the final vote.

Younger voters
As much as 30% of the US population is under 30 years of age, but these voters are vastly under-represented in polling samplings, partly because many of them use cell phones exclusively. Tellingly, when younger voters have been polled successfully they've broken overwhelmingly for Kerry by ratios of about 65% to 35%. Also, youthful voters have been registering to vote in this election in large numbers. Most young people in this age group believe that Bush will be forced to restart the military draft and compulsory military service. They are afraid of being sent off to die in service to this administration's failing war in Iraq, and rightly so.

Minority voters
In this election cycle, the Democratic party and allies have reacted to the Republican's systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters in the last election by focusing on registering larger numbers of new minority voters than have ever participated in any major US election previously. Of course, the Republican party has been working to register its voters among poor whites and especially fundamentalist so-called "christians", as well, but it appears that the Democrats have managed to mobilize and register up to 50% more new voters than the Republicans in swing states. It remains to be seen whether the Republicans will be able to deny votes to these minorities in higher numbers than Democrats got to register.

Bush's low approval
US President George Dubya Bush has been in trouble for months heading in to this election, based upon his job approval ratings in periodic polls. It does not bode well for any incumbent US president whose job approval falls below 50%, and Bush's numbers have been wallowing down in the 40% to 45% range for a while. Some election pollsters contend that this one number determines whether any incumbent president will be re-elected, so on this alone it may be possible to say that Bush's goose is cooked. One might even predict that Bush will get his job approval percentage of the popular vote, in which case he might get only 40% of all votes today.

Undecided swing voters
It is thought that undecided voters tend to break two to one in favor of challengers over incumbents. So, depending upon which poll one looks at, there might be 3% to 6% undecideds, which could translate to a 2% to 4% swing of earlier undecided voters to challengers Kerry and Edwards.

Therefore, for all of these reasons, my considered opinion is that the Democrats Kerry and Edwards will win this election and that they'll win by a solid margin of the national popular vote, somewhere in the range of 50% to 49% (with 1% for Nader, et al) to 59% to 40% (same 1% others), with my guess for the most likely results falling around 55% to 45%.

For how the Electoral College results are likely to break, I'll suggest reviewing Professor Tannenbaum's website, which is linked below. Let us all simply hope that the outcome is clear and not a repeat of 2000. µ

L'INQ
Electoral-Vote.com