Why the pollsters got it wrong

I'm talking from San Francisco, which is as good a place as any – and perhaps better than most – to escape from the eastern view of the presidential election. The view not so much of what happened, as of what was going to happen, for the east, the north-east, is the headquarters of the four television networks and the home of the pollsters and there's has rarely been an election in which all the polls, including the ones undertaken by two TV networks in association with two distinguished eastern newspapers, in which all the polls were so much in agreement about the outcome.

It was going to be so tight that, on the eve of the election, they, with one exception, announced that it was too close to call. The exception decided, at the last moment, that there was a swing to Reagan that might give him as much as four or even five per cent lead over Carter in the popular vote. In the outcome, it was ten per cent and, even if you add John Anderson's vote to Carter's, you still come out with an absolute Reagan majority of three millions in over 83 millions.

Why were they all so disastrously wrong? It's a question that's going charitably unanswered in the euphoria of the Republicans and the depression of the Democrats.

It seems to me worth risking one answer which might persuade the pollsters next time to change their tactics. They concentrate, to the point of obsession, on the popular vote, that is on the totals likely to vote one way or another, but the presidency is never decided by the total popular vote of the whole country. It's decided by the majorities of the popular vote in each state and, since that states have a vastly different apportionment of votes in the Electoral College, it is the distribution of the popular vote, not its mass, which chooses the president.

Let me simplify the working of the Electoral College by asking you to image that ten boys, in the top form of a school, are going to vote for head prefect. If every boy had one vote, then obviously whoever got six votes would win but suppose that a different number of votes was assigned to each boy, through some consideration of age, experience or length of stay in the school, so that one boy has six votes, another four, four more have two votes and the rest one each. This would add up to a total of 22 electoral votes. The winner would need 12 votes and he could get them from only three boys in the ten. That's the way the Electoral College works.

Each state, according to its population, has so many congressmen, members of the House of Representative, and each state, huge or tiny, has two senators. The electoral vote of every state is the number of its congressman plus the two senators. So that California, with 43 congressmen and two senators has 45 electoral votes. New York has 39 congressman, two senators, 41. Wyoming, a physically large state but sparsely populated has only one congressman and two senators, three electoral votes, and so on.

So, to begin with the pollsters' maps of the United States showing practically the whole of the west painted blue, as going for Reagan, was deceptive. He won Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Utah, Idaho and the state of Washington, but altogether that gave him only 39 electoral votes. If he'd lost California, with its 45 electoral votes, he would have been six votes down in the whole far west. He didn't, however, so the west came in with a handsome 84 electoral votes for him.

Now, the pollsters agree with the pundits that any presidential election turns on the popular vote in nine big states – the 'big' meaning the most populous states which, their size apart, hold the most electoral votes – and they are California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Florida and New Jersey. Together they have 245 electoral votes, only 25 short of the majority needed to win. If you add Indiana and Missouri, you'd get 270. So it would have been possible for Reagan or Carter to win the election by getting a majority of the popular vote in 11 states, while the loser took the other 39 states.

Well, Reagan took the 11 I mentioned and was already the winner. In the result, he took 44 states and Carter took six states and the District of Columbia, the home of the capital city.

If you want to write an even more sinister scenario, as we now say, you could imagine a tight race everywhere in which 11 voters, literally, 11 human beings, by having a change of mind as they went into the polling booth, could switch the election from one presidential candidate to his opponent because the whole electoral vote of any state goes to the man who has a majority, however minute, of the popular vote. And if that sounds like a ludicrous possibility, let me remind you that in the election of 1960, when over 60 million people voted, a switch of only 40,000 votes in chosen states could have sent Richard Nixon and not John F. Kennedy to the White House.

My suggestion is simply that, next time, the pollsters spend more time taking more and more accurate samplings of the voters' mood in those nine big states instead of piling all the projected votes of the 50 states into two lump sums. There was no sign, this time, of a close call in any of the big nine. In California, Reagan had a majority over Carter of one and a half million. In Texas, 700,000, Florida 600,000, Illinois 400,000, Pennsylvania 250,000, Ohio 450,000, New Jersey 300,000, Michigan 250,000, New York 160,000.

The pollsters might also keep reminding themselves that there have been three so-called 'minority' presidents, that's to say, presidents who did not get a majority of the popular vote but what they got, they got in the right places.

It was, no question, a famous and, for the pollsters, a humiliating victory and yet... and yet, only 26 qualified Americans in a hundred voted for Reagan. That's because only half of the registered voters took the trouble to vote, the lowest turn out in nearly 30 years. So without taking anything away from Reagan's astounding massacre of Carter – 489 electoral votes to 49 – we have to be disturbed by the thought that the mandate which he and the Republicans claim is a mandate conferred on him by only one American in four, a fact that could threaten all sorts of turmoil and, in some poor quarters, could stimulate a revival of the violent protests of the 1960s.

We had a... a nasty harbinger of this the day after the election, when across the bay from here on the Berkeley campus of the University of California 2,000 students gathered in a noisy, though peaceable rally and chanted belligerent slogans against the man they love to hate, the most grizzly of which was, 'Two, four, six, eight, we know who to assassinate'. And that, I hasten to say, was the low point in protest or comment anywhere in the United States.

But some hint of the rather raw emotions that have been let loose can be seen in the first cartoons drawn by the half-dozen or so first-rate political cartoonists with which the United States is presently blessed. One showed a Reagan got up in cowboy chaps with his hands on two guns sticking out of his side pockets, the caption said simply, 'Back in town!'. The San Francisco Chronicle, which takes advantage of the wit of Oliphant, the Washington Star's resident cartoonist, showed, the other day, three recognisable grotesques with outspread arms tumbling in ecstasy down a mountain side and headed for us. They were in front, Reagan, and behind him, buoyed up by the roaring wind and the clattering boulders, Dr Kissinger and Richard Nixon. The caption was one word, 'Landslide'.

I ought to say that people are talking in stage whispers about the possibility of former President Nixon being offered a post in the Reagan administration. Somebody dared to suggest to one of Mr Reagan's campaign aides that Mr Nixon, himself, might be thinking that way. The aide put paid to that, I think, with an acid retort, 'If he is, he must be hallucinating'.

But whether the people out here are happy with Reagan or sorrowful with Carter, they have one grievance against the president which is shared by the other western states that lie in the fourth time zone of the United States, three hours behind the eastern seaboard. This is an angry and by now well-aired protest against the president's going on the air to concede the election two hours before the polls had closed out here. It was an astonishing and, in President Carter, an uncharacteristic gaffe, a blunder both of tactics and manners.

It seems that the White House decided, after less than an hour of the television coverage, that the election was lost. NBC had been bitterly criticised for coming out within that hour and positively announcing Reagan as the winner but the president himself was ready to jump the gun on NBC and take the initiative. He was restrained but when he did concede, his aide said he thought it would be a simple, manly thing to do.

Evidently, it didn't occur to any of them that there was an hour of polling still left in the mountain states and two hours in the far west. There doesn't appear to be much question that many thousands of voters, seeing the president make his concession speech on television, took off their coats and stayed home. They may not, thereby, have affected the presidential vote but senators and congressmen who lost narrowly out west were quick to blame the president.

The upshot has been two proposed bills in the House and one from a California senator in the Senate proposing that the voting times across the country be synchronised so that New York, for instance, would vote from 09:00 am to 09:00 pm and California would vote from 06:00 am to 06:00 pm, all the states closing the polls at the same time.

I should guess that these bills will be quickly shelved. They present awkward complications and a prospective barrage of complaints from farmers, office workers, night workers, to go no further.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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