Election predictions and certainties - 30 October 1992

Finally, on Tuesday the 3rd something like 80 million Americans will go into voting booths, draw a curtain behind them – which ensures them the privacy of a confessional box – and face what a foreigner might look on as the dashboard of a jet, a whole battery of little levers. They then decide which ones to lock in place against alternative sets of names. And just what percentage of those millions are going to flick the lever for Clinton-Gore or for Bush-Quale is something nobody knows.

Of course, you'll say "nobody ever does know", but in most previous elections we've had a pretty good idea about the outcome, no matter how dogged our personal preference is. Though I have to say that whenever I've put it to a friend during the past two months or so the challenging question – putting aside your own prejudice and looking at it as objectively as you can, what is going to happen? – all but one of a dozen friends picked as the winner the man he wants for the winner, which is a natural, sad commentary on the capacity of the human being for objectivity in anything, and perhaps explains why there are in any society so very few great judges.

This time is a particularly perilous one for prophets and gamblers, not simply because the pollsters hope in giving the election to Mr Clinton for two or three months, not because they're now warning us that his lead has shrunk drastically during the past week, but because it ought to have been clear since the earliest summer that what has drastically changed this year is the balance of party's allegiance. Now that's a rather cryptic phrase, let me explain.

For as long as I can remember, it was a constant of American politics that there were four registered Democrats for every three registered Republicans. The four first. Eisenhower and then Nixon broke the Democrats' vice-like grip on the South – through most of my time it was known as the solid, that is Democratic, South. Before then, the ratio in the country as a whole was three Democrats to two Republicans. However, did the Republicans win at all? Well, for Congress they didn't, for the presidency people are not so entrenched in their party as they are when it comes to voting for a congressman to take care of their own neck of the woods.

The presidency is a special show – a search for leadership – and every four years the people look for a new Moses, sometimes finding him in their party, sometimes in the other, sometimes in the wilderness like Ross Perot or John the Baptist, but for Congress in the past 60 years, the Republicans have had a majority in the House of Representatives for only four years. It's one of the permanent ironies of our two-party system.

Now, what makes prophecy more dangerous then over this time is the third figure, the independents. For at least 30, 40 years, we've always said "can't say – roughly 45% Democrats, 35% Republicans about 10% independents and the rest that dependable immortal minority that doesn't know anything, doesn't feel anything, doesn't stand for anything". Sometimes those independents rally behind a third-party man. This has happened on and off throughout this century, though the main effect of a powerful third-party men has been to act as a spoiler and deny the presidency to the main choice of the party they broke away from, as happened in 1912 when the rebellious Theodore Roosevelt formed his own party, ruined the chances of his former Republican friend and president and let the Democrat Woodrow Wilson come roaring through the middle.

In our own time, in 1948, the incumbent president Harry Truman was up against not one but two deserters from his own party, as well as the regular Republican contender. In the result, he got less votes than four opponents combined but that was what we call the popular vote – the total, not the figure assigned to each state in the electoral college. We'll no doubt be going into that next time.

But to come back to the independents and what's alarming or baffling about them this year. When the primary elections were over in the late spring, a survey was done of the party registration throughout the country. Of course, we expected it would show much the same percentage of party allegiance as usual. We were in for a shock. Roughly it came out 30% declared Democrats, 25% Republicans and wait for it, 40% independent. As the summer and the fall and the polls have gone along, we've had the honesty to ask ourselves, perhaps not carefully enough, what is an independent? It's always been somebody, somebody like me who puts down on the ballot form under party "independent", which of course doesn't mean I'm necessarily going to vote for a man who calls himself an independent candidate. Choice might be for one of the regulars or the libertarian candidate, if there is one, or the teetotal candidate or the vegetarian or anyone of the – I think this time it's 23 – people who are running separate campaigns for the presidency. Most of them never get enough petitions to get on the ballot in more than one or two states, Perot as we all know did and so did the libertarian. The rest, if you're an ardent yoghurt and lemongrass man, you're going to have to write his name in.

What has emerged from this staggering figure of 40% independents is that they're a very mixed bunch united only by their scorn off or distance from this time the two regular parties. And more and more of the polls have been showing that amongst this mysterious 40% only a small minority considered itself what you might call professionally independent, people who've always declared themselves as belonging to neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. Many more of them are disturbed regular party members who are not sure this year whether to stay with their party or not, others say they haven't made up their mind but expect to by next Tuesday morning. And somewhere in there, maybe a nucleus of the deciding faction, people who march to the polls on Tuesday knowing full well who they're for get behind the curtain and say "mm, ah" and change their minds.

Anyone in the class remember the election of 1968? It was a Nixon landslide. It came out a few weeks after the election, after several polls had been taken around the nation that if the election had been held on the Wednesday instead of the Tuesday, Hubert Humphrey would have been the handsome winner for the Democrats. On election day itself, there was a Humphrey wave rising across the country, it didn't rise high enough or soon enough and Nixon didn't just sneak in, he thundered in, which only goes to show how dangerous it is to go on the polls that are reported the weekend before the election.

Many times during this campaign, you'll have heard people warn anybody who's cocksure about the famous year of 1948 and Truman's astonishing and totally unpredicted victory, that battling bantam cock came charging up from behind. That's the usual story. President Bush himself has said so and he's promised he's going to do the same. Well, Truman did not come from behind and on another count in another way, 1948 is a poor analogy. All the pollsters – there were only three of them then – used a method of polling which the 1948 result actually discredited and it was never used again. It was known and notoriously known as quota sampling.

The interviewers were sent off and told to talk to say a 100 individuals according to a predetermined ratio of men and women, city dwellers and suburbanites, married and single, drawn up from the known census figures. The interviewer had a choice of seeing people in the flesh or talking to them on the phone. The fatal flaw in this method turned out to be this, it was easier and more convenient to interview people who lived in pleasant houses, it was easier still to interview them over the telephone who had the pleasant houses and who had most telephones? Forty-odd years ago, it was discovered in retrospect the answer was overwhelmingly the Republicans. The polls we now know were heavily weighted in favour of Republicans and the Republicans, need I say, were heavily weighted in favour of the famous prosecutor of gangsters, the very able governor of New York, the anti-tax and the spend man Thomas E Dewey. The other 1948 factor, which is so very different from today, is that the national economy then was in thumping good shape, unprecedented numbers are employed, America very much the world's credited nation.

Now this years' polling, a man whose curious speciality at the University of New Hampshire is surveying polling methods for strengths and flaws has come on one fault, which the other day he warned us about. He calls it the force to choice question, the standard procedure of asking if the election were held today whom would you choose? If they're not sure, they are pressed to say whom they're leaning to. The result is that only about 10% come out undecided. Professor David Moore believes that if people were allowed a choice of saying also unsure, the percentage of undecided's including declared independents in the voting population would be nearer to 35% than 10. And it seems to me that it's those people especially the unsure who are unsure till they draw the curtain who will decide.

The Clinton team, while trying to maintain an air of being about to move into the White House, is haunted these nights by the thought of the last British election, the second thought of those polled Labourites who paused and decided that the devil they knew might be safer to pick than the tax-and-spend opposition.

Some old timers maybe shocked to notice that I haven't talked about the issues. Well, having read the plans, what the pros call the position papers of the two candidates and driven myself into a fog of incomprehension, I can only say the issues are even more complicated than either candidate makes them, but that both of them have had the grim sense to realise that the issues as laid out in their platforms – whether its enterprise zones in the slums or term limits for congressmen, the health system, whatever – are too much for the voters. Better simply pick two grudges' talking points and bang away at them. Both men have done this shamelessly, incessantly, so that so far as Mr Bush is concerned, Mr Clinton is a dubious character and will tax and spend the country into ruin, that's all. And as for Clinton, Mr Bush is something of a liar and has no ideas, that's all. From everything we see and hear on the telly, those are the issues we'll vote on.

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