Snnnnnck.
Out come the long knives, the jabbering classes urging Al Gore -- now that the Supreme Court and a Florida circuit court have given him no love -- to put country above self. Congressional Democrats leak that time is running out. "Last gasp for Gore," The Boston Globe informs us; "Aura of Pessimism Pervades the Vice President's Team," reports The New York Times. Among the punditry, reports The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, "learned analysis of Gore's situation, after a careful sifting of all the relevant evidentiary matter, can be summed up thusly: Finito. Toast. Dead meat. History. Road Kill."
And then there are the polls: Beginning with a CNN/Gallup poll taken after Katherine Harris' certification of George W. Bush as the winner, polls put the numbers at 58 to 38 against Gore. And a Newsweek poll taken over this past weekend, showed that 53 percent of the country believes Gore should concede while only 44 percent urge him to continue his contest of the Florida elections. And an ABC/Washington Post poll from right after the latest rulings has 57 percent of the country pining for a Gore concession, and only 40 percent jonesing for more legal challenges. History, confides an eminently disinterested Dick Cheney, will cast Al Gore "in a better light if he were to bring this to a close in the very near future."
Thanks for the free advice, Dick. But let's take a closer look at these polls, and thus at the most pressing argument for Gore to concede: the will of the people.
For one thing, these polls sample all adults -- not just people who voted in the 2000 elections, but also people who stayed home (so to speak). Those who did not vote in the elections undoubtedly wish that this would all be over, so that Court TV can stop broadcasting circuit court hearings in Florida and start broadcasting the Rae Carruth murder trial. But on the matter of who should be our next president, their opinions literally do not count.
Of those who did vote, it's worth pointing that, first and foremost, almost none of these vaunted polling organizations called the actual election correctly. The only one who did -- John Zogby, whose calls in New York Senate races have been dismal, but whose calls on the presidential elections have been spot on -- has not yet published a poll on Florida. Of the rest: Newsweek had Bush winning 45 to 43; CNN had Bush winning 48 to 46; and ABC/Washington Post had Bush winning 48 to 45. The actual numbers? Gore beats Bush in the popular vote, 49 to 48, with a meager 3 percent showing for Ralph Nader. So we know that nearly all the polling organizations have consistently underestimated pro-Gore sentiment. We also know another very important fact: 51 percent of voters did not vote for Al Gore in this election. Thus, in theory, 51 percent of voters have a very un-high-minded reason for wanting Gore to concede, namely that they do not want Gore to be president.
Now, I'm not going to be so blatantly unscientific as to suggest that one take the 51 percent of the country voted for someone besides Gore; factor in the 2 to 4 percentage points by which our polling organizations underestimate pro-Gore sentiment; factor in the additional 3 to 4.5 percent statistical margin of error in the post-election polls; and arrive at the notion that almost every person who tells pollsters they want Gore to concede actually, in fact, either voted for one of Gore's opponents or did not vote at all. But it does show that in any important sense, the will of the people remains evenly split between the two contenders for president of the United States. And if that's our standard -- as poll-obsessed reporters seem to think -- then it's not quite time for Gore to give up.
