Who’s Gonna Win?
Monday, August 23rd, 2010
Tomorrow is Primary Day. Wanna know who’s gonna win? .
Lotsa luck. So would everybody else. But they don’t know. Quite possibly, nobody knows. What fun.
No doubt some Vermonters (perhaps including the five Democratic candidates for governor) are distressed by this uncertainty. Better to savor it. Like much of life in Vermont, it’s a chance to live life they way it used to be lived, a throwback to the days before polling.
Or at least before polling was reasonably accurate, which is roughly 60 years now, meaning longer than most folks remember. Polling’s biggest mistake came in 1948, when all the surveys predicted that Thomas Dewey would beat President Harry Truman, inspiring the Chicago Tribune to hit the streets with journalism’s most celebrated headline. “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
(A blunder firmly stuck in the newspaper’s memory as late as 1976, when the managing editor telephoned the reporter covering the New Hampshire Primary warning him not to call the winners prematurely because “we remember 1948 here”).
Since then, polling has gotten a lot more sophisticated, and if it’s hardly perfect, rare is the election in which almost nobody has the foggiest notion about who’s going to win. In recent years, two Vermont news organizations, the Burlington Free Press and WCAX-TV (Channel 3), contracted with polling firms. This year, they didn’t, perhaps to save money, perhaps because the polling firm Channel 3 had been using, Research 2000, has been sued by another client, and seems to be at least temporarily out of business.
Besides, this race might be effectively impossible to predict, even with a passel of polls. In any election, but especially in a primary, pollsters don’t just make their calls, ask the folks who answer for their favorite candidate, and tote up the answers. That would be pointless because not everybody who answers the phone will vote. So the pollsters first have to “screen for likely voters,” to use the industry jargon.
Hard to do when: (a) the primary is earlier than it has been; (b) no candidate has excited most voters; but (c) no candidate has repulsed them, either, and most Democrats could happily support any one of the five. The usual screening technique – asking respondents if they intend to vote, then maybe asking if they really intend to vote – might not be all that effective.
This could explain why no poll results have been leaked. There are polls. Two candidates, Deb Markowitz and Peter Shumlin, have retained pollsters. Presumably senior staff at both campaigns have some results. Yet none of those senior staffers seems to have sidled up to a reporter and whispered sweet statistics in his or her ears.
Meaning either that neither of those candidates is ahead (or at least safely ahead) or that the results remain inconclusive thanks to the likely-voter screening problem.
(Wait. Isn’t it possible that the senior campaign staffer, even armed with a poll showing his/her candidate in the lead, is too scrupulous to leak confidential campaign information?
Uhh, now that you ask: no).
So Vermonters are happily in the dark. We can all expect some real suspense tomorrow evening. Just think: a reality show with no vulgar housewives. What fun!
Does this mean the race can’t be scoped out at all?
Of course not. So let’s scope, starting with the conventional wisdom, a good place to start because, despite its bad image, the conventional wisdom is usually right, or it wouldn’t have become conventional.
The first conventional wisdom about political campaigns is that the candidate with the most money usually wins. So it’s a two-person race, between Markowitz and Shumlin, the ones who’ve raked in the bucks.
But here’s some conflicting conventional wisdom. In a low-turnout primary, which this is likely to be, the candidate with the best grass-roots support usually wins.
That would be Doug Racine, endorsed by the teachers union, the state employees union, the AFL-CIO, and the Vermont League of Conservation Voters (not, as stated in earlier versions of this post, the Vermont Natural Resources Council, which may not and does not endorse candidates). If all these organizations do a get-out-the-vote operation tomorrow – phone banks, email reminders, ferrying voters to the polls – Racine has a shot, too.
Especially because he’s the only candidate from vote-heavy Chittenden County, and was endorsed last week by a passel of influential Progressive Party members. Only around 10 percent of Vermonters are committed Progs (party chair Martha Abbott got 12 percent running for auditor in 2008), but they tend to be politically aware. They vote.
So it’s a three-person race.
Except for that little voice saying you can’t rule out Matt Dunne. In the last few weeks, he’s been endorsed by the Herald of Randolph, the Addison Independent and the Stowe Reporter. In the last few months, he’s raised more money than Racine and has run some pretty good television ads. His campaign seems to have some energy. At 40, he’s the youngest of the candidates, and the one most at home in the high-tech wired (or, actually, wireless) realm that may or may not be the future.
So it’s a four-person race.
Having come this far, can we take it a step farther and find some way for the fifth candidate, Susan Bartlett, to win?
Not really.
“This is anybody’s race to win,” Bartlett’s campaign claimed in an email yesterday.
Anybody’s but hers. Too bad in a way, because one can make the case that she’d be a good governor. But she never raised enough money to be competitive, nor did she give voters a compelling reason to select her over one of her better-known, better-financed opponents.
But wouldn’t it be funny if she did win?
Whoever wins will debate Republican Brian Dubie Thursday evening in South Burlington. The News Guy will be there, liveblogging from the debate hall (as will Anne Galloway of VT Digger) for Vermont Public Television. The next evening, the News Guy will be on VPT’s ‘Vermont This Week,’ broadcast at 7:30 PM Friday and 11:30 AM Sunday
