Election Day is here, And away … we … go.

 

 

COLD OPEN And away … we … go.    Election Day is here and instead of our normal Wednesday edition, I thought it would be fun to talk about a couple things to watch for tonight as the returns come in. The first is who was right about this race. Not the Republican analysts or the Democratic analysts—I mean the national polls or the state polls. For the last few weeks the two universes of polling data were telling us different things. The national polls suggested a slim, but visible, lead for Mitt Romney. The state polls suggested the same thing, but for President Obama. To quantify this divide, Real Clear Politics’s Sean Trende did the backbreaking work of building a national average out of the state polling numbers. (He ought to get some sort of medal.) Trende discovered that the aggregated state polls suggest Obama has a 2.5-point advantage. This divergence shouldn't exist. Both the universe of national polls and the universe of state polls have enough entries and big enough sample sizes that errors should cancel one another out and the averages should be quite close. But clearly something is going on. And while they could both be wrong—maybe we're looking at a 50-50 split, rather than an advantage for either side—they can't both be right. Now, to some extent the tension began to resolve a little bit over the weekend as the national numbers ticked ever-so-slightly toward Obama and a couple of the state numbers ticked a teensy-weensy bit (that's a scientific term) toward Romney. But the split was still visible to the naked eye even as I cast my vote earlier this morning. The other possibility is that both sets of polls were simply living on opposite ends of the same margin of error. One of the often-overlooked aspects of the polling data is that basically the entire race is in the margin of error—and has been for a couple of weeks. In a country with something like 130 million voters, it's not practical to get a big enough sample to bring the margin under roughly 3 points. Which makes it possible that the state and national polls really were seeing the same thing, but that, for whatever reason, their outputs were grouped at opposite ends of the error window. But I'm not entirely convinced by that explanation either. So we’ll have to keep watch. LOOKING BACK "The idea of America as a force for morality predates the founding of the nation. The first European settlers saw America as a noble experiment, a do-over for the corrupt and compromised cultures of Europe, and a chance in an unspoiled terrain of endless abundance to start the world anew. The Puritans saw themselves as the Children of Israel in a new iteration, delivered from bondage (in Egypt and England), escaped by the way of a perilous voyage (through the Red Sea, and over the ocean), and settled at last in their own land of promise, where their work for the Lord could begin. The Puritans built a religious community that they believed would serve to the world as a model of piety, under the terms of a covenant detailed by John Winthrop in 1630 that served as a template for the next 300-plus years of American history: 'He hath taken us to be His, after a most strict and peculiar manner, which will make Him the more jealous of our love and obedience … For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.'" —Noemie Emery, “Evil Under the Sun,” from our November 3, 2008, issue.