THE POLLS

Posted at 7:06 a.m. ET

All the polls point to an Obama victory.  But could the polls be wrong?  It is the question a number of analysts are asking.  It is, after all, such an unusual political year, with the first African-American presidential nominee of a major party, with predictions that normally underrepresented groups will vote in larger numbers, with stories of large-scale voter-registration fraud, and with allegations of massive press bias.  The Washington Post reports:

Sen. John McCain and his allies say that they are. The country, they say, could be headed to a 2008 version of the famous 1948 upset election, with McCain in the role of Harry S. Truman and Sen. Barack Obama as Thomas E. Dewey, lulled into overconfidence by inaccurate polls.

"We believe it is a very close race, and something that is frankly very winnable," Sarah Simmons, director of strategy for the McCain campaign, said yesterday.

Typical campaign spin?

Few analysts outside the McCain campaign appear to share this view...

...Still, there appears to be an undercurrent of worry among some polling professionals and academics. One reason is the wide variation in Obama leads: Just yesterday, an array of polls showed the Democrat leading by as little as two points and as much as 15 points.

An expert view:

"I have been wondering for weeks" whether the polls are accurately gauging the state of the race, said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota. Borrowing from lingo popularized by former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Schier asked what are the "unknown unknowns" about polling this year: For instance, is the sizable cohort of people who don't respond to pollsters more Republican-leaning this year, perhaps because they don't want to admit to a pollster that they are not supporting the "voguish" Obama?

If so, that could mean the polls are routinely understating McCain's support. "I have no evidence that this is happening," Schier said, but he added: "I'm still thinking there's a 25 percent chance that this is a squeaker race and McCain pulls it out."

The opposing view:

"It is very unlikely that we are going to get surprised by a last-minute movement," said John R. Petrocik, chairman of the political science department at the University of Missouri. "Obama has been running six to eight points ahead for the better part of two weeks, and it's hard to imagine that turning around."

The McCain campaign is insistent, but its position appears based on the notion that turnout this year will resemble turnout in 2004.

To buttress its point of view, the McCain team points to results reported yesterday by the Gallup organization, whose daily tracking poll showed Obama up 49 percent to 47 percent using Gallup's traditional turnout model, which assumes that turnout will follow the patterns of past elections. Obama has a larger lead, seven points, using a model that allows a higher presence of first-time voters.

The McCain campaign says that expected increases in African-American and new voters will be offset by increases in Republican voters. 

Who is right?  We'll know next Wednesday morning.  Or, maybe we won't.  John Fund, of The Wall Street Journal, said last night that, if the race is close, the recounts and accusations of voter fraud could dwarf anything seen in past elections.  The outcome might not be known for days.

October 29, 2008.