Michael Moore Got the Last Laugh This Election Day
“We’ve won seven of the last eight elections in the popular vote, we’ve got more registered, we have a new crop of young people every year, plus the fact that 70% of eligible voters are either women, people of color, or 18- to 25-year-olds, or a combination of the three,” Moore said, a profile that pretty well describes much of the Democratic Party’s base.
Among the pundits who turned up on the talk show rounds after the big upset, pollster Frank Luntz, who admitted on CNN to his own overestimating of the GOP turnout, cited an “overindexing” or overcounting of Trump voters that pollsters began to make after 2016 to make up for the higher distrust of pollsters among the MAGA masses. Their effort to have a more accurate count may actually have resulted ironically in an overcounting of Republican voters.
Another ominous sign for Republicans emerged among independent voters, who usually break 55-45 for Republicans. “If they break 60-40,” Luntz he said, “Republicans win. In this case they broke 50-50. That’s a real problem for the GOP.”
Also, Republicans apparently received 5 million more votes than Democrats, Luntz said. But their representation being diluted by unforeseen results of gerrymandering, which “had a bigger impact on Republicans than anybody realized,” Luntz said, “and you could not know this until an actual election took place.”
You could say the same about a lot of polling. As an old saying goes, the only poll that really counts is the one on Election Day. Everything else, as we saw this year, is just preparation.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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