It Ain't Over Till It's Over

...The premature gloating on view among liberal columnists and the postelection plans being made by Obama and his allies might be turned by McCain to his own advantage...

...Fortunately for his campaign, McCain does not trail by so large a margin as that which Humphrey and Ford had to overcome...

...In the end, his rally fell short as Nixon won by less than 1 percent of the vote, just 500,000 votes nationwide...

...At that time there were just two major polling organizations, Gallup and Roper, both of which reported significant leads for Dewey...

...Both, however, were so far behind when they launched their rallies that they could never quite erase their disadvantages...

...Truman proved the pundits wrong in 1948, and there remains a slender chance that McCain might do so again in 2008...

...George Wallace, the third party candidate that year, claimed 20 percent of the vote...

...A Gallup poll taken on the last weekend of the race even gave Ford a 1 point lead, 47 to 46 percent...

...Notwithstanding this fact, however, many pundits, pollsters, and public fi gures have rushed forward to declare the race over and Obama the presumptive winner...

...BY JAMES PIERESON With just two weeks left before the election, John McCain faces a difficult test in overcoming the lead established by Barack Obama over the past month...

...Nixon’s lead was undiminished in late October from where it stood when the campaign began in early September...

...Indeed, McCain’s challenge is not dissimilar to that which faced Truman in the fi nal weeks of the 1948 campaign— that is, overcoming a 5-point or so lead against a relatively unknown and aloof opponent who seems assured of victory...

...If John McCain can fi nd any solace in these developments, it must be in the fact that his role has been clarifi ed as the underdog who has been written off as a loser by the pundits and pollsters...

...According to his estimates, Dewey was ahead by 10 points in Illinois, 7 points in California, 11 points in Ohio, 15 points in both Iowa and Wisconsin, and 7 points in Massachusetts...

...Less than a week later, however, Humphrey had chiseled the lead down to 8 points (44 to 36 percent), mainly at the expense of Wallace’s vote, which dropped to 15 percent...

...His pardon of President Nixon in early September combined with the diffi cult economic conditions of the mid-1970s led many to conclude that the race was over before it even began...

...Somewhat like Truman in 1947 and 1948, McCain has been preoccupied with foreign policy at a time when economic issues have seized the headlines...

...Many declared the race over, as Nixon began announcing plans for the transition...

...There is some precedent in the elections of 1948, 1968, and 1976 for the kind of late in the game comeback that McCain must now try to engineer...

...He did not attack Dewey personally so much as he ridiculed the “no good 80th Congress” which (he claimed) took sides in favor of business against labor unions...

...On the eve of the election, the polls declared the race a dead heat...

...A Gallup poll also taken in early September gave Dewey a 12-point lead (48 to 36 percent), with third-party candidate Henry Wallace at 5 percent...

...The race thus remains surprisingly close, especially in view of the headwinds blowing against McCain from the financial turmoil that erupted into public view in mid-September...

...A later poll taken in mid-October gave Dewey a more slender lead of 46 to 40 percent with Wallace’s vote taken down to 4 percent...

...Public opinion polling was then still in its infancy, and Truman’s surprise victory came close to discrediting the industry altogether...

...House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid are already developing a legislative agenda that they will introduce in Congress in January in cooperation with the new Democratic administration...

...Many pundits in 1948 said that the New Deal era was about to end, just as some have said recently that the Reagan-Thatcher era will soon be over...

...Humphrey surged in the last weeks of the campaign by playing upon longstanding fears among Democrats about Nixon’s character and by persuading conservative Democrats to abandon Wallace...

...Most polls were in a cluster with an estimated Obama lead of 5 to 7 points...

...Humphrey and Ford rallied in the closing weeks of the 1968 and 1976 elections by raising doubts about the character or competence of their opponents...

...Ford had trailed Carter by more than 30 points in polls taken in July and by 18 points in late August...

...The most dramatic electoral comeback of modern times was, of course, Harry Truman’s victory over Governor Thomas Dewey in the election of 1948...

...McCain, like Truman, is burdened by an unpopular administration of his own party, though, in contrast to Truman, he has some chance of disassociating himself from it...

...The day after the election, the New York Times, in vindication of Truman’s forecast, published an article under the headline, “Election Prophets Ponder in Dismay,” in which the heads of the leading polling organizations acknowledged that they did not pick up the late trend in favor of Truman...

...Truman carried every one of these states (narrowly) in the election, for a swing of 116 electoral votes in his favor...

...Polling experts learned from harsh experience that, in order to forecast accurate results, they had to continue taking surveys right up to Election Day...

...You can throw the Gallup poll right in the ashcan,” he said, adding that “there will be more red-faced pollsters on November 3 than there were in 1936 when they had to fold up The Literary Digest...

...If there is anything voters do not like, it is being taken for granted by politicians...

...Gerald Ford’s furious fi nish against Jimmy Carter in 1976 was of a different character than the Humphrey rally, which proceeded by bringing traditional Democrats back into the fold...

...The Gallup organization also conducted surveys in each of the 50 states on the basis of which George Gallup, in an article published in the Washington Post on October 29, predicted that Dewey would win 363 electoral votes and President Truman 140 (with a few states too close to allocate...

...In the end, the structural obstacles to his campaign (a bad economy and the hangover from Watergate) were too much for Ford to overcome...

...Truman encouraged his supporters by telling them over and over again that he was going to win the election, notwithstanding what the polls and editorial pages were saying...

...Yet by raising questions about Carter’s competence to lead and by attacking Carter’s promise to pardon all Vietnam draft resisters, he cut the lead to 6 points by mid-October...

...Dionne and Harold Meyerson, have declared that Obama’s pending victory will mark the end of the conservative era and doom for the low tax and free market policies favored by Republicans since the late 1970s...

...Truman, confi dent of a victory, ridiculed the pollsters in the fi nal days of the election...

...Elmo Roper, much to his regret, took a single poll in early September giving Dewey a 15-point lead (53 to 38 percent) and abandoned the fi eld for the rest of the campaign in the belief that the race was over...

...Ford was able to cut into Carter’s lead by appealing to independent voters who by 1976 represented more than a third of the electorate (here perhaps some precedent for McCain...

...In the tumultuous election of 1968, Senator Hubert Humphrey trailed Richard Nixon by 12 points (43 to 31 percent) in a Gallup poll published on October 22...

...Truman succeeded in gaining ground on Dewey by casting himself as an aggressive alternative to his cool and detached opponent who seemed to be coasting to the fi nish in the belief that his election was a foregone conclusion...

...He lost by two points nationally, 50 to 48 percent...

...The fi nal Gallup poll taken on October 25 and reported in the press a few days later, gave Dewey a 5 point lead, 49 to 44 percent (or a lead very close to the one Obama now has over McCain...

...An ever-growing number of national polls showed Obama with a lead last week of somewhere between 3 and 14 points—though few people outside the Obama camp gave much credit to the latter margin, reported in a CBS News/New York Times poll...

...In the fi nal results, Truman won by 5 points nationally, 50 to 45 percent...

...Senator Obama himself is said to be making plans for an election night victory celebration...

...The fi nal Gallup poll, released on the day before the election, gave Nixon a two point lead, 42 to 40 percent—in other words, a dead heat...

...Ford did not help himself with a blunder in the second presidential debate whereby he denied that Eastern Europeans lived under Soviet domination...

...Liberal columnists, such as E.J...

...James Piereson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism...