The politicians, pundits and pollsters who took a beating about their inaccurate forecasts of:last November’s election have spent the last two months explaining and defending. They still haven’t figured out what happened.
The typical pragmatic political campaign counselor draws a semicircle on a chart that supposedly maps the political spectrum from right to left. He thinks that the political game is to position your candidate one notch to the right of his opponent so that your candidate can rake in the maximum number of voters who are not sympathetic to the opponent’s ideology.
This political strategy reflects a basic error. Most political campaign managers live in a cloistered world in which they think that everybody votes and that people vote on the issues which public opinion surveys have identified as relevant to the particular election.
Traditionally, about half of Americans don’t vote, and an even larger percentage care little or nothing about elections and politics. The pollsters have not discovered a way to measure whether or not people will actually vote because the act of voting is based even more on motivation and on the weather than on issues.
Even the weekend before the election, a survey question asking “Do you intend to vote?” would be worthless, since few registered voters would be willing to answer “no” to that question.
Illinois was a state where the election results were very different from the pre-election polls. The reason the polls appeared so inaccurate was the massive turnout of voters who were not expected to vote.
The motivation that drove these people to the polls on election day was wholly unrelated to any 1982 campaign issues — indeed, unrelated to any question asked by any of the sophisticated and scientific pollsters who were surveying and predicting. The motivation didn’t relate to the 1982 election at all; it was a dress rehearsal for the Chicago Mayoralty primary election in February 1983.
One month before the November 1982 election, the Chicago Democratic organization registered 135,000 blacks who had never been registered before. The get-out-the-vote drive on election day was efficiently carried out by hundreds of organization Democrats who hold city-of-Chicago patronage jobs.
The motivation for this army of precinct workers was simple: if you want to keep your job, you deliver the votes in your precinct. Twenty-to-one Democratic was considered the minimum expected ratio.
The motivation for otherwise apathetic and disinterested citizens to bestir themselves on election day was the fear that failure to vote would endanger receipt of their welfare checks, food stamps, social security, or unemployment compensation. This fear had been carefully sown and cultivated.
Once at the polls, the straight Democratic ticket vote was achieved by a new technique called “express voting” — guiding voters who wanted to vote a straight party ballot into an “express line.” This was the 1982 equivalent of the “marked ballot” — the old-fashioned paper-ballot technique under which the ballot was marked so that your boss would know how you voted.
Standing in the “express line” destroyed the secrecy of the ballot and let your boss see how you voted. If you stayed in the booth longer than a minute, it would be obvious that you had disobeyed your orders to vote a straight Democratic ticket.
Just to make sure that the voters didn’t get confused, inside many polling places, voters were openly urged to “Punch Ten'” — the number on voting machines for the straight Democratic ticket. Of course, such electioneering is illegal.
In other parts of the state and nation, a powerful motivation to go to the polls to vote Democratic was provided by a ruthless and demagogic use of the Social Security issue. TV ads the last few days before the election even showed Republicans tearing up a Social Security card.
All the other election issues combined, including unemployment and the alleged “gender gap,” don’t account for a fraction of the votes picked up by the Democrats through election chicanery and Social Security. If Republicans expect to win any elections in future years, they will have to learn how not to get walloped by election fraud or Social Security.
