It's not as close as you think...

With the collective meltdown of the left beginning so soon—I saw it coming, only in October instead of now—much woohooing has been made of these “right track/wrong track” poll numbers. If you’re not familiar with the concept, or if you’ve never participated in any type of poll, one of the questions often asked will have something to do with whether you believe that policies, the economy, or the country is generally headed in the right direction, or the wrong direction. The leftmedia are claiming that because somewhere between 48-52% of people polled are answering that so-called “things” in America are on the “wrong track”, that somehow the country is divided and Kerry is still running a close race to Bush. To this, I say good grief…for people who are portrayed to be so damned cerebral, they must be among the biggest idiots on the planet.

As much as the left wants to forget that people like me exist, it is inescapable. I am one of those folks who poll conservative, extremely likely to vote, extremely likely to vote for the President’s re-election, and of the opinion that the country is headed in the wrong direction. “Wait a minute,” you say, “how can this be?” Sure, the automatic assumption is that if you’re in favor of the President, that you would naturally believe that things are going well. Any person who has listened to a group of conservatives sitting around bitching about letting “me be philosopher-king for a day” will know that things couldn’t be further from the truth. Based upon no science whatsoever, I will still safely predict that the particular strata of pro-Bush/wrong track thinking society accounts for somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/3 of poll respondents; somewhere in line with those who identify themselves as very conservative, or even conservative/libertarian.

Here is the missing follow-up question: why? Why is the country on the wrong track/right track? For people like me, the reasons could never be remedied by a Democrat administration. I may not agree with President Bush’s bloated domestic spend-spree, I am convinced that the most likely way to eliminate activist liberal judges, high taxes, and bigger government is through pursuit of a truly conservative/semi-libertarian agenda. In short, Republican conservatives and libertarians accept that we must settle for the best of what we have, because the alternative is simply a disaster. Bush does OK, but he could do better; Kerry will certainly do worse.

If you are interested in how polling works, but don’t want to be bored with the Political Science jargon, I highly recommend a few chapters in Dick Morris’ book, “Off With Their Heads…” does a very entertaining and thorough job of explaining the mechanics of the art (or science if you believe it so) of polling, including how bias is manifested in weighting. The rest of the book is a bit of a waste, with Mr. Morris as literary master of articulating his personal greatness and brilliance ad-freakin’-nauseum, but if you can pick it up at a discount , the polling sections definitely make it worthwhile. I wish I had this reference when I was studying Political Science methods during my undergraduate career.