On Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, we the people proved the naysayers and doomsayers wrong.
Predicting the future will always be a booming business. Veteran pollsters and pundits and consultants and analysts who got things wrong in 2004 came back again for this Presidential election cycle, lecturing us about how things would turn out.
But the 2008 campaign created a new low watermark for inaccurate forecasting. The sheer volume of incorrect, unfounded, distorted, imaginary, or just plain bizarre crystal-ballery staggers the mind.
For example: The following is a short list of just a few of those -- on both the Right and Left -- who scornfully or mournfully declared that that Barack Obama "can't win," ... or some close variation thereon... At the end of the diary, please add your own thoughts and examples. (And of course, recs/tips are always appreciated.)
* Rush Limbaugh ("Obama will lose big")
* Alex Castellanos, Republican strategist and CNN commentator
* Shelby Steele, author and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, on NPR
* Ed Koch, Former NYS Mayor and failed gubernatorial candidate
* Tom Hayden, activist
* Steve Mitchell, head of Mitchell Research.
* Hillary Clinton, trying to earn Bill Richardson's endorsement
* Jacob Weisberg of Slate hedged his bets, saying if Obama lost, it would be because of racism
* Mark Penn (rewarded for his mishandling of Clinton with a New York Times opinion columns and cable news appearances
And then there was pollster John Zogby, who used his gut to peg the race as a "virtual" tie just a couple weeks before the Obama landslide (and my local NPR affiliate nodded in agreement, saying "anyone who tells you this race isn't close, just doesn't know what they're talking about").
Below, are just a few of the other choice lowlights of the abysmal predictions business for this cycle:
* In March 2006, the New York Times assured us that Hillary Clinton was locking up most of the major Democratic fundraisers "to make it harder for potential rivals to compete in 2008," thus deterring others from entering the race. LINK Yet Barack Obama went around the fundraising establishment, raising more than $700 million, most of it from small donors on the internet.
* As early as May 2006, CBS News and others had already anointed Clinton the "frontrunner" for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. LINK
* In the summer of 2007, we were still being told that Hillary Clinton's Democratic nomination was "inevitable," LINK and that John McCain's campaign was "on life support" in the Summer of 2007. LINK
* They told us that former Senator Fred Thompson, better known as the grumpy D.A. on Law and Order, was the next Ronald Reagan. He didn't win a single primary. Ditto Rudy Giuliani, another sure-thing Republican, who led in the polls throughout 2007.
* Newsweek and others fretted that Obama would have trouble wooing Latino voters, given supposed historic animosities with African-American, compounded by Republican inroads among Latinos made by Bush. The "black-brown divide," we were told, would sink Obama, since "tensions in this country between blacks and Latinos are alive and well." LINK By the end of the race, Obama was favored by 81% of Latino voters.
* We were told that Obama's bruising primary with Clinton would harm him with female voters, and bogus McCain front groups such as the PUMAs (short for Party Unity My Ass) got tons of press coverage as they claimed to represent millions of Hillary fans defecting to the GOP. In the end, Obama won solidly among women, who delivered his margin of victory.
* They told us that the selection of Sarah Palin was a brilliant move by John McCain. But by election day, 14% of Obama's support came from former McCain backers who defected because of Palin.
* We were told that Obama would have problems among Jewish voters, who--though representing barely 1.3% of all voters--were said to hold key swing votes in states like Florida. In the end, Obama was favored by Jews by a two-to-one margin, and was also the overwhelming favorite of Israelis.
* We were told that the Obama campaign's decision to stay out of rump primaries in Michigan and Florida would doom his chances in those delegate-rich states. But the McCain campaign withdrew from Michigan with its tail between its legs in October, and on November 4th, Obama won the decisive 27 electoral votes of Florida, whose butterfly ballots and partisan Secretary of State had doomed Al Gore eight years earlier.
* We were told that the primaries showed that only Hillary Clinton could carry the "big states," but in the end Obama won California, New York, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, Virginia, and more.
* We were told that Obama and DNC Chairman Howard Dean's 50-state strategy was pointless and wasteful of party resources. But they went ahead and poured resources into every state regardless of delegate counts, stealing formerly "safe" Bush red states like Iowa and Nevada away from the GOP. And the effort helped countless Congressional candidates "down-ticket" to prevail in their local contests, giving Obama a bigger working majority to enact his platform.
* We were told that unlike Clinton, Obama would have trouble among white, working-class "Wal-Mart" voters, as well as independents. But Obama proved his ability to convince such voters of his steadiness and qualifications, from the first Iowa primary to his reassuring three debate performances against McCain.
* We were told endlessly--even after it was repeatedly debunked--that The Bradley Effect was real, and that the polls must be overestimating Obama's chances, because racist voters weren't being honest with pollsters. LINK In the end of the general election, just as he did in the primaries, Obama equalled or even outperformed most polls.
Unfortunately, there is little penalty for getting things so wrong. Soothsayers don't even have to be particularly good at their jobs, because people tend to find even the worst predictions fascinating. In fact, a sure way to get attention for a prediction is to make it wildly counter-intuitive.
Elections are exhausting enough without being subjected to the ravings of every academic with some cockamamie theory, every concern troll who imagines the sky falling, and every hack with enough funding to run a phonebank.
If you know of other spectacularly bad predictions, please add 'em in the comments...