It is not that these pollsters and campaign workers and so forth are dishonest, they often need to hedge their bets. Pollsters particularly realize that wrong calls like those that occurred in 1948 when Thomas Dewey was regarded as a sure thing over Harry Truman, for instance, can destroy their credibility for good. Gore's rise has been so precipitous that many of the best surveyors are having difficulty believing it. At the top of the list of those who want a big-time, smashing finale is the press, whose reporters and editors have a vested interest in the excitement that a close fight generates. In a runaway election, publishers and editors see little reason to spend the huge amounts necessary to keep their political reporters and columnists on the road.
T here is little reason to doubt the surveys.
As reports of Gore's ascendancy increase, and reports of Bush's continuing inability to get into sync abound, it all becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy. If the nation's top journals would accept money for news reports, Bush, it seems, would have a difficult time buying a good story despite all his campaign funds. The Gore campaign clearly has been highly successful in distracting the national media and Bush himself with small-change stories about subliminal campaign advertising messages and a host of other rather silly incidents. In reality, there may be nothing Bush can do, except to hope that if the lead looks too large a number of Gore voters will stay home. Even if he does well in the three scheduled debates, he must face an economic climate that just keeps getting better, reinforcing the belief among the fewer than 50 percent of the eligible voters expected to go to the polls in November that there is little reason to change.