The "Undecideds": Science vs Intuition Poli Sci 101

There are many ways to acquire knowledge.  

One of them is "polling."  When I was in college, I took a course in surveying public opinion and learned the statistics, limitations and difficulties of using standard questions to assess the opinions of other people.

I had another experience, outside of school, which revealed my own limitations in misreading people.  As an 18 year old, I started an age group swimming team, with a friend of mine, at a newly built community pool. We recruited kids from age 8 to 17 to swim the different strokes and relays required by the county swimming league with an eye toward, eventually, creating a team good enough to enter the least competitive division of the county league. 

We told the assembled kids, before each practice, stories about kids we had swum with, how they failed at first, persevered and ultimately triumphed. The kids looked at us blankly, and I could not see past their eyes. Their expressions were not blank, but, to me at least, they were unreadable. Were they thinking, "Oh, spare me the pep talk, coach.  This guy is just all about himself.  This guy is coaching this team because he needs an audience" or what?
We arranged a meet with another team which had been formed a few years earlier and was now in the county league.   This other team had been pretty well crushed in it's first two summers in the county league, not having won a single meet. We brought over our kids' times from the time trials we had run, and the other coach looked them over and smiled and agreed to swim us. Finally, he had a team his kids could beat.

The morning of the meet, our kids assembled on the far deck, and I stood near the starter's gun at the near deck. When the gun went off, starting the first race, something happened which astonished me: Our entire team, about seventy kids, leaped to their feet and roared.  I looked down the deck to my friend,  and he was as stunned as I, but he just shrugged. 

We crushed them.  Our kids swam times which were ten seconds better than they had done in time trials. Ten seconds in the water is a lot of distance. Eight year olds swam an entire 25 meters breathing only once.  Our kids were, in a word, psyched. 

I had misread the crowd. The other team's coach was not pleased. He thought we had lied to him. He thought we had brought him numbers which were phony, doctored to make our kids look slow and easy to beat. But we had collected and recorded the numbers honestly. What we had not been able to measure was what was in those kids' hearts.

Yesterday, I went door to door with my clipboard and pencil and computer sheets.  At one home  there was an Obama sign on the lawn but I had only one name in the house to ask for: the husband. I'd ask if he was going to vote. Yes. Was he leaning in any particular direction?  No, he said, looking me in the eye, smiling. "Oh, I saw the sign on your lawn."  He looked me in the eye, "That's my wife's sign. You asking about how she's going to vote or about how I'm going to vote?"  That went down on my sheet and into the computer as Mr. Deadeye, "Undecided."

Back at the office, I was told some people simply take the secret ballot seriously. You cannot be sure how he is going to vote. I may have misread the man.   But there I am, standing there in my Obama hat, and the guy says he hasn't decided, a week before the election. 

Now, maybe, he is like Maud's friend, a man who will go into the booth thinking he's going to vote for Romney and then he'll vote for Obama. Maybe, after all this, he really is undecided, as if he doesn't yet know enough about Romney and Obama. Anything's possible. He may be the long lost King of France.  But I don't think so.

That response, "undecided," seemed like a pretty clear statement to me. The guy is in his own house on a Saturday, and I've pulled him away from whatever he's doing. He doesn't want to engage in a political argument. He just wants to get rid of me. So, fine. But why can I not enter him as a Romney vote? It's clear he is not voting Obama, or he'd tell the guy in the Obama hat that. In fact, he might say he was voting Obama, just to get rid of me. 

People who came to the door, when I was not wearing my Obama hat, who were voting for Obama, would often say they intended to vote, but they left it there, no mention of who they would vote for. Then I'd slide my hand down from the back of my clipboard and the Obama sticker would show through, and they'd smile conspiratorially, almost as if they were admitting they smoked marijuana when they were kids, and maybe now and then, even now. "Oh, yes. I'm for Obama. My husband, too."

So, my intuition about the "undecided" voter  told me I was talking to a Romney voter, or at least not an Obama voter, but science demands more evidence than gut instinct. The question is, does my taking in unmeasured data, a look, a set of circumstances mislead me, or inform me beyond what one measure--what the person actually says--can tell us?

In Malcolm Gladwell's world, did I know in a Blink?

And if this is a problem at the street level, what do we make of our polls?

The professor will tell you, it's all in the numbers. If you sample enough voters, the voters you get misleading responses from will wash out among all those who are straightforward.

We can always hope.  During the election of 1864, General George McClellan, who had been the beloved commander of the union Army of the Potomac (before Lincoln fired him) was a handsome, charismatic man, who would ride down the ranks of his soldiers, waving his hat to the cheers of his troops. He ran against Abraham Lincoln on a peace now platform. The troops loved McClellan,  and they were weary in the extreme. They were bitter, more often defeated than victorious, and one had to ask, why would they vote for the cerebral Lincoln, with his stentorian,  high pitched voice and his top hat?  

But they did. Like that crowd of young swimmers, they had something inside they weren't showing. They voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln; they voted to push ahead with the war, despite all the hard times, to push ahead with the war, which was unfinished and in doubt, and they decided the election and the outcome of the war with  the ballot. 

Those men, who could march twenty miles through the day, then charge across a field with musket and bayonet, who could find strength beyond exhaustion,  were Americans of another time.  They were different from supersized Americans today, who do their fighting on computer games. They were tougher not just physically, but, I suspect, mentally and possibly, morally tougher. 

The Union army had suffered defeat after defeat, had incompetent generals, not just for one debate but for battle after battle. It took over three years to find Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, to get them into position to push the war to victory.  The troops tolerated a lot of disappointment, defeat, government ineptitude and misery, but they could see that Lincoln was pointing them in the right direction, away from a slave nation, away from a divided nation where aristocracy lived on plantations and the 99% lived around them in meager circumstances, away from a world where those who were winners felt no obligation to help those below them, away from a world of meanness and heedless greed.

Every soldier fought for his own reasons. Each voted for the same reason: To go forward.

The nation, as a whole, fought for only two reasons: Ending slavery and preserving the only democracy on earth, the last best hope of man, a government of the people, by the people, for the people. That idea had not been put into any government anywhere else on earth, at the time. The civil war tested whether or not the idea of democracy could endure.

At a White House reception, Lincoln walked up to the diminutive Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. He stooped forward to shake her hand and said, "So this is the little lady, who wrote the book, that started the great big war."

Lincoln knew, as he said in his 2nd inaugural address,  the war was fought for moral reasons, because of ideas.  One hundred and fifty years ago, our people were able to see through the gibberish with moral clarity. I'm hoping today's Americans still can.