Sandy, Sandy, Sandy, what are you doing to us? I don’t mean us New Yorkers — I mean us election junkies.
You may have thought the most haunting news yesterday morning was the flooding of the FDR Drive, or the closure of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.
Silly you. Such piffle was nothing compared to the nuclear force of the announcement among people who are consumed by the 2012 election that one of the 10 national “tracking” polls — which try to measure the short-term, day-to-day state of the presidential race — was shutting down due to the storm.
It’s not even a good one — IBD/TIPP, it’s named, and it only calls 150 people a day, making it absurdly prone to large and meaningless shifts from tiny changes — but the decision to close it down brought home the horrifying prospect of . . . days and days without data.
Gallup, the most important tracking poll, announced at 2:30 p.m. that it’s giving up on its daily meaure. Rasmussen is based in New Jersey, like TIPP, and so may have no choice simply because of power outages.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which is basically nonsense because it’s conducted online and therefore without reality checks, won’t even be able to claim anything meaningful if many millions are without power tomorrow and Wednesday.
You know what this means? It means no national data. And it will mean questions about whatever data is reported anywhere east of the Continental Divide owing to the sheer size of the storm. If Ohio is drenched in rain and places there lose power, so much for polling Ohio.
What will be left? Some polling on Nevada, which has probably already landed in the Obama camp? Or Colorado, probably a Romney pickup? Sure, a little Minnesota, which has become a bit of a fight, and Wisconsin.
But even though there’s all this argle-bargle about how presidential elections are 50-state tallies and what matters are the state-level polls, in the final week there’s a strong case to be made that all that is beside the point.
What really matters now is the national
mood.
If the nation is more critical than approving of the president by next Tuesday by any reasonable margin, there isn’t a firewall high enough in Ohio to save him. By the same token, if the country feels good about the president and his job performance, his firewall will likely hold and he will squeak through.
What role might the storm play? Not much, unless the results are so awful that it washes the president away in a bad-news tsunami.
Let’s think more positively about the storm — and more practically about the president’s political chances in the midst of it. They’re not huge. Obama may want to use it to look presidential, but he’s going to have trouble making the case that he’s deeply involved, given the eager-beaver political obstacles in his way.
In these crises, it’s local officials like Mayor Bloomberg and Govs. Cuomo and Chris Christie who take center stage.
Yes, the most shameless publicity maven in America, New York’s Sen. Chuck Schumer, did manage to get himself before the microphone at the Bloomberg press conference yesterday, and seemed ready to hold onto it until the storm waters reached his chin.
Notwithstanding all the powers of the presidency at his disposal, even Barack Obama couldn’t successfully get between Chuck Schumer and a live mic. And there are Schumer wannabes aplenty up and down the Eastern seaboard.
If the mainstream media wanted to blame Obama as they blamed George W. Bush for the handling of Hurricane Katrina, they could do so if they had an opportunity — but who are we kidding here?
Absent the president single-handedly saving a baby from a basket in the bulrushes, he’s unlikely to benefit from the storm and its aftermath.
Which leaves the race where it is.
But where is it?