Lessons from America 'VOX POP'

Parliamentary Monitor

Nov 2000

Sir Robert Worcester

It's Sunday morning as I write from New York City, with three days to go to "Election 2000" in America. The race for the White House is tight as a tick, with the vote so closely fought between Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore that pundits are predicting a photo-finish. Such things as the squeeze on the five percent or so now indicating support for the Green Party's Ralph Nader and the turnout of the Black and Hispanic vote is thought likely to determine the outcome. Further confusing the issue is that the presidency is determined by the electoral college, not the popular vote, so that how the candidates do state by state is the thing the pros are watching most closely.

But the good people of Oregon won't be going to the polls on Tuesday. The State of Oregon has done away with polling booths, voting machines, poll watchers and all of that. Yet the forecast there is for an increased "turnout", as Oregonians as they are called cast their postal votes. Oregon has carried it the furthest, but there are now 13 of the 50 states which now allow early voting, some by post, others by taking the balloting to the people and a few, including Arizona, testing on-line internet voting.

In the 1998 Congressional elections, quite a number of the states, mostly in the Western US, had a large proportion of their voters casting a postal vote, as many as half of all voters in the state of Washington, up to a third in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, and a quarter in California, Nevada and Tennessee, according to my friend Warren Mitofsky, exit poll guru for CBS and CNN on election night. His take on this new phenomenon, being tested in Britain, is that it increases turnout, and will affect such things as 'presidential coat-tails', whereby candidates for other Federal and state officials on the 'blanket ballot' Americans face at the polling booth determine their preference between the presidential candidates and who then cast a 'straight ticket', rather than 'ticket-splitting', which so many Americans have traditionally done in years gone by.

Mitofsky's point is that while there are 435 Congressmen and women up for election, being forced to defend their seats every two years under the US Constitution, only a few, 30 according to his estimate, are the key races which will determine which party controls the House of Representatives in the next Congress. Of these, over a third, 11 by his count, are in the states where early voting is allowed, varying by state from 17 to 21 days before election day.

In some other states, estimated to be 18 in all, measures have been taken to enable voters to cast their ballot more easily. In the key swing state of Michigan for instance, all eligible voters over 60 automatically receive an absentee ballot to use if they choose to vote postally rather than trek to the polling stations.

The BBC has kindly invited me to be a part of their team for the US election night coverage, I am in New York now and flying down to Washington later today, for the final two days preceding 'Super Tuesday' talking to the pollsters, psephologists and pundits about the American presidential election. It has been a fascinating experience.

A country separated by many things including the same language, there is little similarities between the way their elections are run. This is true in terms of structure, management, size and scope, and most of all funding. Reportedly the Bush campaign is spending c. $120,000,000 (c. 16375 million pounds) while Vice President Gore's campaign has topped some $60,000,000 (in excess of 16340 million).

Attention being given to the polls in the presidential contest is immense. Every day poll numbers rain down on the electorate, for the most part appallingly presented and little understood. So far, by the count of pollingreport.com, there have been 238 national opinion polls estimating the share of the popular vote for each of the presidential candidates. That's just under four polls a day since Labor Day. And that's just the national polls. In addition, nearly every state has someone conducting statewide polls, for that is where the outcome will be determined in this federal form of government. The Harris Poll, led by the veteran ex-British pollster Humphrey Taylor, will release a national telephone poll on election day, and also the result of internet surveys in 38 states with over 300,000 interviews.

There are three key 'tracking' polls, largely discredited in Britain, which use a 'rolling poll', taking some 300 to 500 'likely voters' preferences each day and aggregating these over a three-day period to get a sample size large enough to report. All have Bush in the lead, but only one with a margin that suggests Bush is home and dry. These give the impression of flux, which suits the media, but does little for any in-depth understanding of what is going on.

Taking three of the 'trackers', the Gallup poll for MSNBC/CNN, the Zogby poll for Reuters/MSNBC and the broadcasting network ABC's, joined on occasion by the Washington Post, and snapshot polls by CBS together with the New York Times, it is likely that as of today, nobody can claim to know what the American electorate will do on Tuesday. One thing is abundantly clear, which is that is for all the hoopla, it's been an incredibly stable national election with 27 out of the 27 Zogby polls showing Bush with 47 percent plus or minus two percent and Al Gore with 46 percent plus or minus two, with 19 out of the 19 polls reported by ABC/WP showing a 51 percent to 49 percent Bush lead, plus or minus two percent, and with four out of the four CBS/NYT polls showing Bush with a one point lead, 49 percent to 48 percent over the Vice President. Graphing them however shows clearly that Gore began slightly ahead, and it's now Bush that is making the running. So, as I write, too close to call.