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Pay no attention to the polls
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Winner of 1948 election President Harry Truman, holding up a newspaper
that had wrongly declared his opponent as the winner.
True, the mainstream media has virtually written off John McCain as the loser of the presidential race. True, Barack Obama has consistently polled far ahead of McCain for the past few months. And true, McCain has been drastically outspent in this election of historical proportions.
Regardless of the decision they make, voters should not concede a defeat or declare a win based on polls, exit polls, or early return results. Let history be the teacher: several times in our presidential history, the polls have been flat-out wrong.
The most recent blunder was in 2004, when exit polls showed the Democratic nominee John Kerry leading over Republican George W. Bush. The result was an overjoyed Democratic populace--partying and celebrating long before many polling locations were even closed. Those who declared a Kerry victory were most certainly disappointed when they awoke the next morning, only to see that President Bush had won.
As the polls on the east coast close and start tallying up the votes, national news networks will begin to report early results. Constant attention to a very small percentage of results may cause voters in the midwestern and western parts of the country to give up or even change their minds.
Perhaps it is far too presumptive to think that Americans will learn from past mistakes. The most famous error was in 1948, when the media declared Republican Thomas Dewey the winner of the presidential race, only to find that once the ballots were counted and full results came in, the Democrat Harry Truman had won. The Chicago Daily Tribune was forced to retract the millions of print editions it had sent out, affirming, “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
These historical blunders should be a lesson to those who take any poll as gospel. If there is any advice I can give to fellow voters, it would be to vote on principle, no matter what, and to pay no attention to the inacurrate polling. No matter what has happened over the last two years of presidential campaigning, this is the only day that matters.
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