ELECTION 2002: YOU HEARD IT HERE LAST

Well, I was ready. I had laid in a good supply of Fritos, Snickers Bars and Diet Coke for election night. I was ready for the long haul. After the endless see-sawing of the 2000 election which went into the wee hours, I was prepared to stay up all night if necessary to see what happened and then perform my duty as a columnist by telling you what to think about it.

There was some early tension generated by Florida, which most politics-watchers were regarding with the same horrified fascination normally reserved for watching someone walk towards an open manhole. September’s primary did little to set minds at ease. Due to voting irregularities in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, it took over a week to declare Bill McBride the Democratic nominee over former Attorney General Janet Reno. In the weeks before the election, concerns (and for humorists, anticipation) mounted. Would there be another polling disaster like the 2000 Presidential race, the one that brought "butterfly ballots" and "hanging chads" into the lexicon of late-night TV comics?

Well, no. The polls opened and closed on time, the new electronic voting equipment worked as advertised, and Presidential brother Jeb Bush racked up an easy win over Democratic challenger McBride. I haven’t been this disappointed since civilization survived the Y2K bug.

There was a bit of a surprise early on, when the networks, wary of another reporting debacle like in 2000, all stated that they were going to abandon their previous stance of "be the first to predict the winner" and were going to be more cautious in predicting the winners of races. "We might not know the winners of certain races until the next day or even two days later," said CBS News Vice President Linda Mason. "There is no pressure to be first," insisted CBS News president Andrew Hayward. "The pressure is to be correct."

Right, I said when I read this. That’ll last until one of the networks (most likely Fox) cracks and makes the first prediction. Then it’s stampede time. But then came another surprise. Voter News Service, the consortium formed by the major news networks, announced on Election Day that it had, basically, crashed and burned. The consortium, upon whom the networks had previously relied to generate predictions, was never able to work out the bugs in its computer analysis of exit polls.

Of course, in North Carolina’s biggest race, the Senatorial showdown between Elizabeth Dole and Erskine Bowles, no one needed exit polls and sophisticated computer models to predict the winner. Dole cruised to an early lead that was commanding enough that the local stations were calling it a win for her by 9:15.

I almost went on to bed at that point. But I wanted to see how the national voting affected the balance of power between Democrats (who held a mere one-vote margin in the Senate) and Republicans (who held a narrow margin in the House). In the end, Republicans maintained control of the House and took back the Senate with seats to spare.

So what does it all mean? Did people turn out for the Republicans because they thought the economy would recover faster under the GOP? Was it support for an invasion of Iraq? Was it the war on terrorism?

Right now, your guess is as good as mine. Thanks to the aforementioned crash of Voter News Service, we really don’t know why people voted the way they did or how the vote broke down demographically. I’m sure, however, that both parties and every pundit will be happy to provide their own totally uninformed spin on the question.

I, of course, am no exception. So, a few random observations:

• I do have to admire the Libertarians. Year after year, they keep fielding candidates, year after year they get stomped, but they keep coming back. It’s either true dedication or denial bordering on psychosis. Maybe both.

• Boy, did Walter Mondale have the shortest political comeback in history or what? After being tapped to jump into the candidacy of Senator Paul Wellstone, Mondale lost almost immediately to Republican Norm Coleman. Rumors, of course have been circulating that Wellstone’s death in a hotly contested election year was no accident. Which only proves that the left has as many loony conspiracy theorists as the Right.

• It’ll be interesting to see how the Republicans handle this degree of success. According to an article in USA Today, "the last time the Republicans held outright control of the Senate, House of Representatives and presidency was in 1954, when Dwight Eisenhower was president and George W. Bush was 7 years old." Will there be a repeat on a national level of what’s happened here in Moore County, where the Republicans, without serious opposition from an outnumbered and demoralized Democratic Party, apparently decided to turn on each other? And if things go wrong, who will they blame? After all, the Reagan and Bush I Administrations had Democratic controlled Congresses to blame. When the Gingrich Republicans had the Congress, they had Clinton to blame (and occasionally prosecute.) Will the Republican Party rediscover the truth of the old adage, "be careful what you wish for—you may get it?"

Stay tuned.

COPYRIGHT 2002 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.