A Potent Portent in Political Prediction

Deep in our history, before electronic communication, news sometimes arrived too late, as when Andrew Jackson and his men killed 2,000 British troops at New Orleans on Jan. 8, 1815, two weeks after the Treaty of Ghent “ended” the war they were fighting. But ever since Dewey defeated Truman, it has been the habit of news to arrive too soon, whether by a few hours or a few days.

Commonly, though, through the necromancy we call “science,” elections are called months in advance, making the participation of actual voters strictly futile. That’s why it was just a tad refreshing Tuesday when the Voter News Service, a consortium assembled by five television networks and the Associated Press -- with subscribers including such news organizations as the Washington Post and the New York Times -- declared its exit polling procedures hopelessly flawed and forced everyone to rely, more or less, on actual vote counts.

Burned by the 2000 debacle in Florida -- during which almost everyone projected Florida wrongly, repeatedly, for Al Gore -- the Voter News Service choked in 2002, while the cable news operations competed to portray themselves as the most cautious prognosticators.

It is a disconcerting fact that the saturation coverage of elections had become utterly dependent on the ability of social scientists to divine the future, taking over the tasks previously performed by analyzing flocks of crows and the entrails of animals.

Yet it is reassuring that we’re not as predictable as some folks might have hoped, and that we’re still strange creatures, a bit inexplicable even to one another.

It has sometimes seemed that we’ve gotten to the point at which actually making decisions was unnecessary: To within a slight margin of error, the statisticians always knew what we were going to do.

Indeed, writing the history of the future on tablets of stone seemed to be the main function of political coverage in the media.

Yet if there’s one thing that might be concluded scientifically from the history of science itself, it is that when we answer our questions, the answers always raise more and harder questions.

Perhaps we might even have reached the point at which we could vote out of sheer perversity, merely to irritate the pollsters and their media representatives, merely to demonstrate our freedom by sheer cussedness.

When the great Jesse Ventura threatened to replace the late Sen. Paul Wellstone with a trash collector, he was expressing his frustration with the predictability of politics, the extent of its regularization and control. And when, on election day, Ventura said the difference between elections in the United States and elections in Iraq was that Americans got exactly one more choice, he was doing likewise.

Some folks might hope that the factors that go into human decisions would become so clear and so few that they could be treated as variables in an equation predicting their actions. Some folks, in other words, would hope that freedom amounted to a rationally determined choice between exactly two alternatives.

Fortunately, the situation down here on Earth is messy and complicated -- so messy and complicated indeed that we often have no idea what we ourselves, much less everyone else, is going to do.

That’s one reason we actually vote: because we can’t, in fact, tell the future or write its history. And that’s why it’s a good thing that the pollsters are choking in the clutch.

A few hours might be too long to wait for news of peace. But it’s not too long to wait for news of the composition of the Senate.

Actually, sometimes I think if I never hear, it would be too soon.