The clunker uttered by a reporter for one of the cable television networks reporting midterm election results Tuesday evening, though hardly a keeper, was nonetheless memorable.
“As of this moment, 54 seconds after the polls have closed in Ohio, the election is still too close to call,” the man said of the gubernatorial race between Republican John Kasich and the incumbent Democrat, Gov. Ted Strickland.
I sat there longing for the good old days when it was fashionable to count the votes before announcing a winner, and it dawned on me that I am hopelessly out of step with modern technology that, with all its fancy bells and whistles, has pretty much taken the suspense out of election night.
As a card-carrying troglodyte who remembers when an election wasn’t over until it was over — with no scientific exit polls, projections, presumptions and predictions to artificially speed the process — I suspect that I may not be the only one whose day is made when pre-election polls of the electorate miss the mark.
In Nevada, the polls had predicted near-certain defeat for Harry Reid — the hand-wringing Uriah Heep-like majority leader of the U.S. Senate — who ran for re-election opposite tea party-backed Republican Sharron Angle. From most reports, a Reid loss would have been widely seen as one giant leap for mankind. But it never happened, and contrarians — including some who are hardly huge fans of the majority leader — likely permitted themselves a self-satisfied smile because the polls got it wrong.
Not that Reid’s victory came as much of a surprise to skeptics who presumed — correctly, as it turned out — that he would have a supply of votes stashed in his hip pocket for just such an emergency. This was not, after all, the wily old codger’s first rodeo.
Closer to home, pollsters trolling the Maine electorate didn’t catch an eleventh-hour surge by independent gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler that was reminiscent of the dramatic late groundswell that swept independent Jim Longley into the governor’s office in 1974.
A week before Tuesday’s election, polls showed Republican Paul LePage had a substantial lead over Cutler in the five-way gubernatorial race and Democratic 1st District Rep. Chellie Pingree a slim lead over her Republican challenger, Dean Scontras. But it was LePage who was involved in a 2 percentage-point squeaker with Cutler, and Pingree who won in a landslide, with 58 percent of the vote.
Wednesday morning quarterbacking centered on the likelihood that several late events that occurred after the final polls had been taken nudged most of an unusually high number of undecided voters into the Cutler camp. But that doesn’t explain the puzzling and contradictory way that voters cast their ballots, University of Maine political scientist Mark Brewer told reporter Mal Leary of the Capitol News Service.
Brewer noted that voters elected a Republican governor by a narrow margin, overwhelmingly re-elected Democrats Pingree and 2nd District Rep. Mike Michaud, then voted mostly for Republicans in legislative races, giving Republicans majorities in both branches of the Legislature to make a clean sweep of things in Augusta. What was up with that? “We have always had a lot of ticket splitters, but this appears to be beyond what we have seen in the past,” Brewer said. “I am not sure we have a real clear explanation of what happened, and why.”
There are, though, two possible explanations for our allegedly quirky behavior in the voting booth. Either we haven’t a clue what we are doing, or — more likely — contrarians to the core, we simply vote for the person we believe can best do the job, regardless of party label. A novel concept, to be sure. But given our track rec-ord as ticket splitters, well within the realm of statistical probability.
Theoretically, our long ordeal of negative advertising, marauding politicians and robocalls at suppertime is over. Realistically, it may only have begun. On the day after the election, television’s talking heads were already discussing the 2012 presidential election.
I didn’t stick around to hear their theories. But it would be no surprise to learn that, with zero precincts reporting, they believe the deal is still too close to call.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.com.