Things I have grown to hate: polls and undecided voters.

Any lefty who doesn’t have an unreasoning paranoia about the state of politics right now is not paying attention. Bush is presiding over a catastrophe of an administration unlike the republic has ever seen, and yet he is 1) doing all right in the polls, 2) the subject of only lightly critical news stories–when they’re critical at all. It’s madness not to be whipped into a paranoid frenzy.

And yet despite that, a rational part of my brain encourages me to settle down. This race is oddly similar to the 1980 contest, in which an unpopular president mired in a flagging economy and troubles abroad managed to stay even in the polls throughout the summer and early fall only to get beat in a landslide. That election turned on the debates, when a nation decided that the doty old actor probably wasn’t senile. Good enough.

In this election, even more than in 1980, people have gotten a look at Kerry. Or fourteen thousand. Even the wholly apolitical have seen Kerry. The only people who don’t “know enough” about Kerry are those who have been in comas for the past year. So that takes us to the polls and the undecided voters. How are the polls still close and who the hell are the undecideds?

I have no clue about polls. The faults in polling are manifold, and it’s difficult to say what exactly causes them to be so wildly wrong. But wildly wrong they are–flopping and flipping well outside margins of error, even beyond indicating general trends. Why people even read the damn things is a mystery. But undecideds–this I get.

Undecideds are not. Six months ago, national polling showed something around 7% of voters were undecided on average (they varied poll to poll, but seven seems about average); state polls have regularly shown the same margin. Then three months ago, as voters learned more about the candidates it was … about 7%. And now, after a billion dollars of advertising and four debates? About 7%.

There’s no earthly way to explain this consistency save that what’s getting measured isn’t whether people have decided. They decided and they decided long ago. Otherwise we’d see variation in undecideds as events emerged. Rather, seven percent of Americans are just coy. They’re intentionally giving pollsters the old f*ck you. That’s the far more obvious conclusion. Seven percent of Americans have had enough polling, and you’re just not going to get them to give you an answer. My guess is you could poll campaign activists and still come up with 7% undecided.

Rationally, I’ve felt for months that Kerry will win. Screw trying to figure out the undecideds and screw the polls. Drink heavily, keep your head down, and watch the Red Sox. Everything else is just paranoia until November 2.