US pollsters on Wednesday put Republican Senator John McCain’s chances of overtaking Senator Barack Obama in the final weeks to win the White House as extremely remote, given the lead the Democratic candidate has built up, the most recent poll putting him 14 points ahead.
Polling experts expect the gap between the two to narrow as election day, Nov. 4, nears, but they regard the contest as effectively over for McCain, barring some dramatic national security crisis.
“You are more likely to be killed by a meteor dropping on your head than McCain becoming president,” said Michael McDonald, who specializes in polls and election number-crunching at Virginia’s George Mason University.
Pollsters said no US candidate had ever been as far behind as McCain at this stage in an election in recent political history and won. Once the electorate shifts in favor of a candidate, as it seems to have done for Obama recently, it seldom moves again, they said.
Doug Usher, who was a pollster for John Kerry in his failed bid against US President George W. Bush in 2004, was more cautious than many of his colleagues. He predicted a tightening of the race — especially since the instinct of the average US voter tends to be conservative. Even so, Usher, who works for Washington-based Widmeyer Communications, described McCain’s chances of winning as possible, but “incredibly remote ... There is only a one in 10 chance that McCain could overtake Obama.”
Like other pollsters, Usher warned that some unexpected event could change the race.
“What is endlessly fascinating about US politics, you think about the most insane thing that could happen — and something even crazier happens,” he said.
A New York Times/CBS poll published on Wednesday gave Obama his biggest lead yet since it began conducting its monthly surveys, putting him on 53 percent against McCain’s 39 percent. Details of the poll suggest that McCain is being punished for the state of the economy, and that his negative campaigning during the past few weeks — going after Obama on personality issues rather than policy — has backfired.
A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll on Wednesday put Obama on 50 percent, to McCain’s 41 percent. Four other national polls give Obama a double-digit lead: Newsweek (+11), ABC/Washington Post (+10), Democracy Corps (+10) and Research 2000 (+11). Gallup gives him a seven-point lead; Battleground, eight points. Even those polls less favorable to Obama have him with a lead of about 6 percent. The error margin is about 2 percent to 3 percent.
The pollsters have proved to be inaccurate before, getting the New Hampshire primary in January spectacularly wrong. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won, even though the polls had given Obama big leads. Last year, Clinton enjoyed a lead of 30 percent nationally over Obama in the autumn, only to see it evaporate within a month or so.
There are a few recent presidential elections that offer McCain grounds for hope. In 1980, pollsters said the contest between then US president Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan was too close to call, but Reagan won by 51 percent to 41 percent. McCain might regard 1976 as a more hopeful precedent, when then US president Gerald Ford cut Carter’s 33 percent lead after the Democratic convention to just 2 percent on election day.
Scott Keeter, director of survey research for the Washington-based Pew Research Center, one of the most respected polling organizations in the US, said that when it last polled two weeks ago, about 20 percent of those surveyed were still uncommitted, enough to reduce or eradicate Obama’s lead if there were to be an international incident or major gaffe by the Democratic candidate that damaged his credibility.
Despite the New Hampshire result, Keeter believes that US pollsters have a good track record. Pew was accurate in 2004 and the average of other major pollsters was close to the final result.
The present batch of polls suggest that Obama is on course for a landslide, with a chance of taking many previously staunchly Republican states.
Another pollster, Peter Brown, of Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University, whose surveys in swing states published this week show Obama in front in several key states that normally vote Republican, said: “No one in modern American history has been as far behind in the polls as Senator McCain and won an election.”
He said opinion surveys had been conducted in the US since as far back as the 1950s.
Pollsters largely discount the possibility of a “Bradley effect,” in which white voters lie to those conducting the survey, saying they will vote for a black candidate but then fail to do so on the day. Tom Bradley, a black candidate running for governor of California in 1982, lost after having double-digit opinion polls leads.
Pollsters such as the Republican Neil Newhouse also predict that young voters, who are broadly two to one in favor of Obama, will turn out, even though as a group they have been notorious for failing to cast their votes.
McDonald, who will be locked away on election day number-crunching the exit polls for one of the big television networks, believes it is unlikely that the polls will shift significantly, because the undecideds have basically made up their minds, having seen the candidates in the debates and given developments on the economic front.
“If you look at recent polls, once they break they tend to stay constant,” he said. “That happened in 2000 and 2004. The polls moved decisively and there was no bounce back.”
“If I was a McCain staffer, I would be looking at my resume, as there is no chance of a White House job,” he said.
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