Pundits’ Truths Losing Big in This Election

This was the year money would be reined in, chastened candidates would shrink from negativity and President Bush would be ubiquitous in his proud march across the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln -- a moment political pundits dubbed “the photo opportunity of the century.”

Of course, none of those predictions proved true. The two major candidates for president, their boosters and detractors have spent more than $1.5 billion in the White House contest, a record sum.

The attack advertising began in March and never let up.

And it is Democrats, not Republicans, who have sought to exploit pictures of the president’s flight-suit promenade -- as a symbol, in their view, of miscalculation rather than triumph in the war in Iraq.

Even Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political advisor, has expressed second thoughts about the “Mission Accomplished” banner famously strung overhead.

But that should be no surprise by now. This most unpredictable of campaigns -- still stubbornly knotted in its last hours -- has demolished any number of truths the political cognoscenti once held to be self-evident.

Among them:

* The candidate in each major party who raises the most money in the year leading up to an election invariably wins the nomination. Tell that to Howard Dean, who easily outpaced his Democratic foes in cash contributions but won only one primary -- in his home state of Vermont.

* Incumbent presidents win reelection -- or lose -- by substantial margins. Maybe. But that would mean a huge shift in sentiment one way or the other virtually overnight.

* Negative campaigning turns people off and drives down voter participation. Not judging by the long lines at early-voting sites and forecasts of the biggest turnout in more than a decade.

* The Democratic nominee will be buried in an avalanche of Republican dollars. In fact, Sen. John F. Kerry has been awash in money, both the record-shattering sum he amassed and the many tens of millions raised by sympathetic groups.

* Big events -- the nominating conventions, the debates -- will turn the race decidedly in favor of one candidate or another. “This has been a dead heat on a merry-go-round,” Democratic pollster Peter S. Hart said.

Even the political map has thrown experts for a loop. Few would have guessed that Republicans would see last-minute opportunity in traditionally Democratic Hawaii, or that Democrats would make a serious play for GOP-leaning Nevada and Colorado.

How did the political intelligentsia get so much so wrong?

“We’ve just never before seen such depth of emotion, such strongly held views on both sides that can override conventional rules of thumb,” said Charles Cook, publisher of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report and one of the country’s leading election handicappers. “There is an exception to every rule, and this is an exceptional year.”

Some things, however, do resist change. Take, for instance, negative advertising. Many surmised that a new law requiring candidates to take responsibility for ad content -- “I’m George W. Bush, and I approve this message” -- would shame candidates into running fewer attack spots.

But repeated academic studies have shown that voters have a high tolerance for negative advertising, as long as a candidate avoids what they see as “cheap shots.”

“One of the things you have to do to get someone to vote for you is to tell them why they shouldn’t vote for the other candidate,” said Craig Brians, a political scientist at Virginia Tech and an expert on political advertising.

Campaign finance experts say it was similarly naive to think that the law passed amid great fanfare in 2002 to cut off the flow of huge donations into the campaign would significantly reduce political contributions.

“Virtually everyone who follows money in politics would agree with the ‘money-is-like-water’ theory,” said Steven Weiss of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. “There will always be cracks in the law and ways in which money can make its way in.”

Still, Weiss said, the reforms had worked to the extent they limited special-interest contributions to the major political parties. Donors seeking legislative favors have been replaced by individuals giving to independent political groups set up for ideological reasons, Weiss said.

Two major guideposts that have applied to past campaigns remain to be tested on Tuesday.

Conventional wisdom holds that reelections are inevitably a referendum on the incumbent. But if Bush prevails, many analysts think it will be in part because he managed to turn the campaign into an up-or-down assessment of the challenger, who was found lacking in these tense times. (Californians might recall the success Democratic Gov. Gray Davis -- a highly unpopular incumbent -- had with that strategy against Republican Bill Simon in 2002.)

Another bit of wisdom holds that undecided voters break overwhelmingly in favor of the challenger. The Kerry side is counting on that; Bush strategists say that is another benchmark likely to fall by the wayside, given the wartime backdrop.

Other, more novel barometers of the election’s outcome will also be tested Tuesday:

* The Nickelodeon cable TV channel has conducted a kids’ poll that has correctly forecast the last four presidential elections. This year’s result: 57% for Kerry, 43% for Bush. However, the Weekly Reader, which has correctly picked the winner since it began polling K-12 students in 1956, showed Bush winning more than 60% of the vote.

* Some hold that Democrats fare better when hemlines are shorter, which would work to Kerry’s advantage this fashion season.

* Others look to the sale of Halloween costumes, which points to a Bush win. Buycostumes.com, which says its measure has accurately called the winner in every presidential election since 1980, says the Bush mask is leading the Kerry mask, 55% to 45%.

* Finally, and perhaps fittingly, the fortunes of Washington’s professional football team have proved amazingly predictive about who will occupy the city’s most famous residence.

Since 1936, the results of the Redskins’ last home game before the election has unfailingly pointed to the winner. Whenever the Redskins have won, so has the incumbent party.

Thus, Kerry can take heart from the Redskins’ 28-14 loss to the Green Bay Packers on Sunday -- even if Wisconsinites still snicker over his mispronunciation of Lambeau Field, the Packers’ legendary home stadium.