Winner ‘04: Pick Your Crystal Ball

In complex times like these, the homespun wisdom of pop culture often trumps the pretentious analysis of high culture. To wit, baseball legend Yogi Berra once quipped: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

So it is for Tuesday’s election. The latest Los Angeles Times poll has the race a dead heat at 48% Bush, 48% Kerry. Most other polls concur, showing the race too close to call, which opens the door to anyone and everyone trying to call it by any means at their disposal, from the ridiculous to the sublime.

As an example of the former, according to one retailer, since 1980 the sales of Halloween masks of presidential candidates have correctly predicted the winner: Among the mask sellers and mask makers it checked, says buycostumes. com, Reagan’s face outsold Carter and Mondale by 20% and 36% in 1980 and 1984, respectively; Bush bested Dukakis in 1988; Clinton topped Bush and Dole in 1992 and 1996; and Bush vanquished Gore by 14% in 2000. Sales posted Sunday: Bush 53%, Kerry 47%. Trick or treat?

Trick. Why not guess that Richard Nixon will be our next president? His mask topped the charts last week at the Joke Shop in Waukesha, Wis.

There’s plenty more egregious predicting going on. The Family Circle’s election Cookie Cook-Off reveals that 67% of the magazine’s readers prefer Laura Bush’s oatmeal-chocolate chunk cookies to Teresa Heinz Kerry’s pumpkin spice cookies. Since 1992, the wife of the winning candidate has taken the taste-test honors -- so is Kerry’s cookie burned?

Or what about the Washington Redskins’ crystal ball? Since 1940, every time the team has won at home on the Sunday before the election, the incumbent party was reelected; every time it has lost, the challenger has won. On Sunday, the Redskins played the Green Bay Packers and lost, 28 to 14. Sounds like good news for Kerry, no?

No and no. When it comes to cookie tasting, there haven’t been enough cookie-election experiments to indicate anything meaningful. (Could be that chocolate, not politics, is the deciding factor.) As to the Redskins record: sheer coincidence -- not to mention selective data searching. Chances are some other NFL team has a record just as “meaningful,” and has anyone checked World Wrestling?

Here’s one that sounds like it might hold water: In its 2004 straw vote, My Weekly Reader heard from 327,707 youngsters who voted for Bush over Kerry 65% to 33% -- and since 1956, My Weekly Reader’s “election” has come up with the presidential winner. But no matter how many times in a row they happen to get it right, My Weekly Reader kids aren’t a representative sample of the electorate.

Even statistics and computers have their limits. Princeton University neuroscientist Sam Wang, for example, wrote a computer program to analyze state-by-state polls and arrive at all possible outcomes of the two-person race in the 22 battleground states (4,194,304 possibilities -- 2 to the power of 22 because there are two choices in 22 states). Last week it came up with a median outcome” figure of 279 electoral votes for Bush, 259 for Kerry. But that didn’t count the undecideds, who historically, Wang says, are slightly more likely to side with the challenger, which would put Kerry on top with 307 electoral votes ... unless Bush wins Florida, in which case, Wang concludes, “his win probability is 88%; if he loses Florida, it’s only 20%.”

Right. I wonder how Halloween masks sold in Florida?

The deep desire to know the future is embedded in the human psyche as a byproduct of having a cerebral cortex large enough to not only be aware that there is a future, but to be aware that we are aware of that future, accompanied by the longing to know what it is. We are pattern-seeking primates. As such, we will glom on to any pattern that appears meaningful. This is the foundation of magical thinking. Connect the dots. Find the pattern. Predict the future.

The problem is that complex systems are inherently unpredictable because there are too many elements to compute, no matter how sophisticated the computational equipment (brain or computer). And there are few complex systems more multifaceted than a political election.

Even so, if the election were lopsided from the beginning -- say, George W. Bush versus Ralph Nader -- predicting the winner would be a cinch, despite the fact that Nader’s scary mug makes a great Halloween mask. It is when the data are unclear, and our models indecisive, that we succumb to the superstitious temptation.

For this election, we would be well advised to note another observation of the sage of Yankeetown: “It ain’t over till it’s over,” which will be Tuesday. Unless we have a replay of the postelection mess of 2000, or as Yogi Berra might describe it: “This is like deja vu all over again.”