Moments Away

Let the voting begin!

In a few hours now, the voters will be flocking, or at least slouching, to the voting booths. The biennial popularity contest has been unusually mmm, contested, this time around. The prognosticators were predicting big things for the Democrats, based on their polling. Then things started to shift. Big surprise! In statistics, this kind of shift is known as Regression Toward The Mean.
In this case, mean is a very apt description. There are a couple of reasons for this: One is that the oft-remarked "undecided" vote is going to go disproportionally to Republican candidates. Easy to see why. A lot of polled voters said they were undecided when they really meant Republican but were too ashamed to admit it. A tipoff: there's that number (18 or 19 pct., I forget) of pollees who say that John Kerry's remark about "stuck in Iraq" (like that's not a true statement of fact!) is likely to influence their vote. If the candidates will sieze on any pretext, well, so will their supporters, it seems.
The other reason is that polling seems to bring out the inner idiot in the pollee. My favorite recent example is a poll from Iraq, in which 80% of the pollees agreed that the United States occupying forces increased the violence in their hapless state, but only 70% thought that it would be a good thing for the occupiers to leave! Of course, I could be reading this wrong; perhaps the 10%difference was by way of those who approved of the additional targets for their bombs and bullets, and would be sorry to see the soldiers leave.