Ed Sills On The Election

Ed Sills is a good friend who covered Texas politics for the San Antonio Express-News before becoming communications director for the Texas AFL-CIO in the mid-1990s. He's an astute observer of Texas politics. He's written an interesting essay laying out his optimism about next Tuesday. Here it is, reprinted in full:

If It Looks, Acts and Quacks Like a Big Turnout…
I dislike polls, not pollsters. Pollsters are great folks, usually smart and often brilliant. But the best of them will tell you that even if they are absolutely scrupulous in all their endeavors, accuracy depends on the turnout models they choose to employ and the vagaries of the human condition.
Sure, pollsters will have the right results, on average, but so will anyone who observes politics carefully, studies districts and makes note of trends. The monkeys trying to type Shakespeare will be right half the time, too. Most national polls now show Barack Obama winning the presidency – a stable prediction for the last few weeks – but the results range from well within the margin of error to well into the double digits. In 2008, polling remains an inexact science and anyone who relies to a moral certainty on the polls deserves the results when they don’t pan out.
Early vote totals, however, are not a poll. In pivotal state after pivotal state, Democrats are turning out early in larger numbers than Republicans, and those votes are in the bank going into Tuesday’s elections. I am a big fan of Ockham’s Razor when it comes to political observation; you don’t make things more complicated than necessary when trying to figure out what is happening. Voters from the two major parties don’t “take turns” to the degree that GOP scenarios for national victory suggest. More likely, we have seen most of the eager partisans from both sides cast ballots so far and we will see traditionalists who like to vote on Election Day and those who were undecided on one or more races go to the polls on Tuesday.
I’m no non-partisan – we should all be hopeless romantics when it comes to big elections -- and recognize that sometimes hopes and wishes overtake the data for anyone rooting for a candidate. For that reason, I will stay out of the business of predicting a winner in any specific race in this forum, except to say this: We are probably in for some shockeroos next Tuesday.
Here are a few observations that don’t touch on the actual likelihood of any one candidate’s victory:
1) Tuesday will be a late night in the presidential contest and many Texas races – not necessarily because the results will be in doubt but because at least in urban and suburban areas the lines are going to be so long that polls won’t actually close until well after the official 7 p.m. deadline, when anyone in line still gets to vote;
2) The early vote turnout in the top 15 counties is up 50 percent from 2004 and, based on anecdotal evidence of huge turnouts today, looks like it might end up close to half of the 7.4 million Texans who voted in the entire 2004 election. Can that pace keep up? Almost certainly not, because early voting has accelerated in popularity every election. Shaving off fractions, in 1996 the early vote in the top 15 counties was 16 percent of the overall total; in 2000, it was 24 percent; in 2004, it was 32 percent. If that pattern follows and early voting in those counties becomes 40 percent this year, it would not be a shocker. Do the math: If 3.7 million is 40 percent of the vote total, we could be looking at a total Texas turnout of 9.25 million, or 68.5 percent, meaning the winner of the presidential contest will almost certainly have to break George W. Bush’s vote-harvesting record of 4.52 million in 2004 just to get the victory. Needless to say, the turnout could end differently if these assumptions are wrong, but my gut says to take the “high” over the “low” bet on this one. At the levels of turnout we have seen in early voting (which confirm the big turnout in the primary elections), surprises become possible throughout Texas. The voter suppression programs simply aren’t working in 2008;
3) African-American turnout in Texas will set all sorts of records and sway the results in Harris County. Participation levels among African-Americans have been good to bordering on excellent around the state in recent elections, and Obama’s candidacy is producing a blowout turnout across the nation in this demographic. Earlier today in Georgia, hours’ worth of lines were extending out the door in minority precincts, where nearly half the electorate had already voted going into today and 35 percent of that vote was estimated to be African-American, compared to 25 percent in the 2004 election. Harris County, where one-third of all voters had cast ballots going into today, has trounced its past early voting performance. The improvement in Harris County’s early vote this year over 2004 is second only to Fort Bend County, and the makeup of the turnout has prompted long-time observers to posit significant advantages to date among Democratic primary voters. It’s not a stretch to suggest that a big chunk of this improvement in performance comes from African-American voters who are overwhelmingly favoring Obama and other Democrats. And Harris County will cast, by far, more ballots than any other county in Texas.
4) Hispanic turnout is not as low as the early-vote comparisons might indicate. While the raw early vote totals in Cameron, El Paso, Hidalgo and Nueces counties lag the other 11 biggest counties, voters in those counties, too, are casting early ballots at a record pace. Nueces and Hidalgo counties are each more than 40 percent above their early-vote totals for 2004. In the end, the Hispanic vote will be a bigger factor than ever;
5) Barring a calamity between now and Tuesday, this will be the first election since 1992 in which dire economic straits will be the clear No. 1 issue at the polls, with everything else a distant second. Yesterday’s report that a major measure of American productivity actually went down over the last three months couples with the continued fallout over the collapse of financial institutions and growing numbers of layoffs. As the price of oil sinks, Texans are slowly realizing -- but maybe not realizing fully by Election Day – that we are not immune to the downturn. John McCain was onto something when he elevated Joe the Plumber, country singer, to mythic levels. (My suggestion for Joe’s first single: “I’m Always on a Train Out of Town”). Unfortunately for McCain, Obama has fully anticipated the significance of economic issues to this election for the last two years;
6) I can’t speak for Republicans, but my hunch is that the GOP weekend turnout program is in place, ready to go and will succeed at reaching the Republican base. I can’t speak for Democrats, either, but the single-mindedness of this year’s get-out-the-vote operations is unprecedented. For the first time since the days of Jimmy Carter, the Democratic presidential nominee has played a major role and has spent money to organize new voters. The giant turnout in March, aided by both the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns, was no accident, and everyone didn’t just forget about it afterward and go home, as county conventions strained building capacities and voters carried their newfound activism into the summer and fall. Texas is Texas, but Democrats have a chance to demonstrate how relativity works on turnout numbers;
7) Though the buzzards have not yet gotten within pecking distance, signs of defeat for McCain in the conservative media are not hard to find. George Will, Peggy Noonan and other reliable Republicans jumped ship weeks ago. Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel, not a liberal by any stretch, today wrote: “All eyes are on Tuesday. For the GOP, the real question is Wednesday. That’s the day the party will survey the damage of the 2008 election, and have to decide what it wants to be….” When discussion on the right of whether Sarah Palin is the one for 2012 overwhelms whether McCain is the one for 2008, you know the Republican tea leaves are set to “ghastly”. That said, the narrowing in some polls, the long-simmering thirst in the Democratic Party and the possibility that the GOP is playing possum all but promise an all-out effort through the last minutes of voting on Tuesday. My side has seen enough false omens to create a new art form in the field of divination;
8) At what level can a national trend penetrate Texas, which is in the top five Republican performers of the last 15 years? Sen. John Cornyn clearly thinks he has the win in the bag, because he has never gone negative and that is contrary to his history as a campaigner. Rep. Rick Noriega, Cornyn’s challenger, had no money for the kind of air blitz Cornyn has bought, but then again, he hasn’t spent TV time wandering like a hermit near canyons, among cow patties and out of Shepler’s. Look at the front page of Cornyn’s web site. It’s the incumbent dressed like a cowboy hanging with horses. I like most cowboys and all horses, but in a campaign that has the run of the mass media, the aversion in ad after ad to placing the senator with other people ought to be raising eyebrows. Noriega, for his part, has dramatically improved his ability to connect with people throughout the campaign, though he didn’t have the means to connect with 13.5 million of them;
9) In the aggregate, the Texas House situation is as well studied as any in recent years. The Democrats have six or so especially difficult seats to defend, but also have potential pickups in many more seats. Everyone is looking at the same 20 to 30 contests. If 2008 is like most elections, Texans will pick and choose and the partisan breakdown may be subject to rolls of the statistical dice in more than one election. If this election is like, say, the 1994 one because of the character of the turnout, however, Republicans may be sitting around wondering where it all fell apart (just as Democrats did when Jack Brooks, Carl Parker and a host of others bit the dust in my first headachy election as a union communicator);
10) This is a historic year. Really. The upset nomination and ascension to the “favorite” position of Obama has made a deep mark on American politics, however 2008 ends. (And, based on the playing field of the final weeks – dominated by Bush states like North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Indiana, segueing into states like Georgia and Arizona – it has the appearance of ending well for Obama.) The trials and tribulations of the economy are reaching historic levels and the international situation is perilous. The next president will almost certainly face the ancient curse of living in interesting times. How historic the election will be in Texas depends, as always, on the turnout. If the magnetic draw of the choices in this election accelerates demographic trends already in place, Tuesday’s election in Texas will be closely analyzed for many years to come.