SCOTTSDALE, Arizona -- We have now entered some altered universe where a lot appears familiar but everything feels somehow different. With three weeks to go before election day 2004, our national macro politics are essentially the same as they were three weeks after election day 2000: We are now, as we were then, a country sharply divided, deeply partisan, and evenly balanced in regard to rage and rancor.
It is ironic that after the great upheaval -- September 11 and anthrax, Afghanistan and Iraq, Enron, Saddam Hussein, and Howard Dean -- we are in many ways right back where we started: deadlocked.
Which might suggest that we are headed for an election as close and as contentious as the last one. But if the political cleavages run along the familiar fault lines, they have grown deeper and more intensely felt in ways that have changed us. And that makes this campaign hard to analyze and the election impossible to call.
The intensity has created a set of circumstances that make history and experience practically useless in trying to predict what the world will look like on November 3. We have a series of what Donald Rumsfeld might describe as “unknowables.” Take as just one example the boom in voter registration all across the country. George W. Bush got to be president on the strength of 537 votes in Florida. This week, Florida officials are reporting that there will be at least 600,000 people on the voter rolls that weren't there in 2000. Just the magnitude of the increase makes it impossible to figure out what's going on in Florida, using the old models. Who's a likely voter, who's a registered voter, and what are they going to do on election day?
No matter how much you know about politics, how much modeling and targeting you do, there is some new dynamic at work that, by necessity, will defy conventional analysis. In Pennsylvania, a state that John Kerry must win if he wants to be president, fewer than 5 million people voted in 2000. There are now predictions that registration will jump to close to 8 million in the Keystone State, and it's the same story all across the country, as new voters have lined up, many of them close to the deadline, to register to vote.
In Philadelphia, it has meant mandatory overtime at the city's voter-registration office. That's good news for Kerry, because Philadelphia is where Bush lost Pennsylvania in 2000 to Al Gore by 205,000 votes. What's more, Bush lost Philadelphia County by more than 348,000 votes, so registration increases in Philadelphia can only be hurting him. Democrats were registering at a rate nine times higher than Republicans. But even Democrats concede that Pennsylvania Republicans are more organized than they have ever been. And in places more hospitable to the president, like Arizona, registrations are up, too.
Arizona has an online-registration system that accounts for just under a third of the state's new registration numbers. Their efforts have been breaking records all summer, and when the full tally is in next week, state officials expect unprecedented numbers.
Then there's the question of what to expect of all these new voters. There's some evidence that Democrats may be helping Democrats, which makes sense because, as Republicans often point out and Democrats sometimes admit, the real engine driving interest in this election is the deep Democratic antipathy toward Bush and the war in Iraq (and the GOP backlash to that antipathy). And in suburban Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where the GOP enjoys a significant registration advantage, new Democratic registrations were outstripping Republican ones by 3 to 2.
The triumph, of course, does not lie in registration numbers, no matter how advantageous they are to one side or the other. The test is who gets up, gets dressed, and goes to vote (no matter what the weather at the polls that day).
The conventional wisdom says that late registrants are less likely to show up than those with track records at the ballot box. Ken Davis, chairman of the Montgomery County GOP, insists that the late surge is not as problematic to him as it might be. “If after everything we've been through -- 9-11, war, this whole campaign -- they are only now deciding to register, who's to say they will show up? I guess we'll see.”
Frederick L. Voigt, executive director of the Committee of Seventy, an electoral watchdog in Philadelphia, told The Philadelphia Inquirer: "If you simply do registrations without a plan for bringing them out, you've only done half your work. The proof will be in the pudding with what kind of turnout there is on Election Day."
There is a fair counterargument, however, that runs like this: If they are standing in line for hours to register a month before the election, it speaks to a greater enthusiasm that surely will have some effect on election day.
But again, we're all guessing. The polls show the race as close, but they have moved around enough that everyone understands that the margin of error means it's time to hold your breath and wait to see what actually happens -- and if we recognize it.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
