POLLS

	November 7, 2000
	Ray Suarez discusses the most recent polls with Republican Bill McInturff, who worked on Senator John McCain's presidential bid, and Democrat Sam Popkin, who worked with the Gore campaign and teaches political science at the University of California, San Diego.

JIM LEHRER: A look at the final polls today and to Ray Suarez. RAY SUAREZ: We get that assessment from two pollsters. Republican Bill McInturff, who worked on Senator John McCain's presidential bid; and Democrat Sam Popkin, who worked with the Gore campaign. He teaches political science at the University of California, San Diego. Well, gentlemen, you've both been dipping into a vast river of intelligence all day. The polls are still open in almost all of the United States, but what can you tell us so far about the size and shape of the electorate? Bill? BILL McINTURFF: Well, I think we're going to have higher turnout than 1996. It's a much closer election. It captured people's imaginations. I think Ralph Nader will contribute to higher turnout. And I think the other thing that's going to be true is the intensity among the Republican base. They've been waiting ever since Monica Lewinsky to kind of clean out the White House -- and amongst, as Paul mentioned, rural voters. I think the National Rifle Association and the work they've done in rural America is going to be critical to the margins tonight, if George Bush does very, very well in some of these states. SAMUEL POPKIN: I think without a doubt you might call the venison belt where the election is going to be decided, the states that are often heavily Democratic on the Great Lakes, but where very large numbers of union men, for example, like to go hunting. The question is, do they want to lose their gun or their pension? And I mean there's the two scares, and I think all year it's been clear that over the last eight years, the ground has shifted both on guns, as Bill pointed out, and also on choice. You know, the country is pro-choice 2-1, but when it comes to the battles today over partial-birth abortion, the country is almost evenly divided. So a lot of the easy rally cries the Democrats had for a while are a little bit spent, and it will be very interesting to see how this comes out in the exit poll. RAY SUAREZ: Along with hunters and union men, some of the targeted votes included Latino, blacks, seniors. A lot of places on the East Coast have an awful lot of those citizens. How was the turnout effort? Did it accomplish much in those categories? BILL McINTURFF: Well, that's of course the key to this election, which is the percent of African-American turnout in most key states. I only have a handful of states where we're hearing reports from the ground. What we're hearing is high turnout, I mean high turnout everywhere, but I think that the... I think what we're hearing is in Central Pennsylvania and in rural West Virginia and through the, you know, the rural parts of Michigan, the turnout there is very, very high, and it's dwarfing the increased turnout in the urban areas. And I think that augers well for Republican success this evening. SAMUEL POPKIN: I think another factor that hasn't been mentioned much in this cycle is there's been a real change in the last eight years in the nature of the senior citizen vote in this country. I mean, very frankly, the Roosevelt seniors are almost gone, and the Reagan and Nixon seniors are a much more affluent bunch. So they're much more evenly divided between the parties. There are a lot of states where Al Gore would win in a landslide if we took away the vote at age 60. BILL McINTURFF: I think what you're seeing is the Democrats ran their character scare campaign on Social Security. They tried to run on prescription drugs. And I think what you're going to see tonight is those things did not quite stick; that amongst people over 60, we're going to see a very, very close election, and we're going to see an election where especially prescription drugs did not move and did not cut the way the Democrats expected with the senior votes. And that's going to, again, I think put Governor Bush in a position to be very, very competitive this evening. RAY SUAREZ: A large number of states are recording they got record number of absentee ballot requests, Florida, California, Nevada, Tennessee; huge mail-in votes in Washington and Oregon. As pollsters, how do you account for those? SAMUEL POPKIN: Well, it's... I've helped work on the polling in Washington and Oregon, and even more surreal is to be polling when 20 percent of the people in your sample have already voted. And you're asking questions to establish the boundaries and the balance in the electorate. There are already people who have turned in their ballots. So you now have a very different party organization. You have get out the mail. And you keep track of whose ballot has been reached. And I think almost there's an incentive for people to vote early so they won't get bothered anymore. BILL McINTURFF: I think what the absentee ballots tell you, one, it's an intensity factors for election turnout going up, but, number two, it's a money issue. Both parties have spent enormous sums of money on these kind of voter programs. But absentee ballots are going to be important for one other reason. We're going to have states that are very, very close, like Florida, like Pennsylvania, but in Florida, we already know and in the Republican Party, we have 110,000 more absentee ballots from Republicans than Democrats. And given that I think Governor Bush will be running at 90 percent of the Republican vote, that's an enormous margin. Tonight if we see in the exit polls in Florida a very close race or we see the votes being counted today that it's very close, we're going to find there are some Republican cushions in absentee ballots in Pennsylvania and in Michigan and in Florida, because of the enormous efforts by these state parties, especially in Florida, where I believe actually we have the best party operation in the country that has banked those extra votes before tonight on behalf of Governor Bush. SAMUEL POPKIN: I want to point out, in the history of the exit polling operation, there has never been an election in which in any single state the absentee ballots were more Democratic than the at-the-polls ballots supporting what Bill says. RAY SUAREZ: Well, we'll talk again later. Bill, Sam, thanks a lot.