Eating Crow

I admit when I am wrong. And I was wrong about the close races in Virginia and Montana. It appears that Republicans have lost their Senate seats in both states, giving the Democrats a one-seat majority. I was right, however, about Corker in Tennessee.

As it turns out Barron's Online was wrong in their predictions about election for the first time in many years. This of course meant that I, too, was wrong since I based my hunches on the usually sound work of Barron's. My hunch is that scandal and the war skewed the projections. For some reason the voters chose not to base their votes on the strong economy as they have in the past. This is probably due to the success of the Democrats in whipping up the voters into a hostile frenzy about the war--all directed at George W. Bush. And, it just so happens that this year the majority of the ones who decided to vote were the angriest. Hostile voters rarely make rational decisions.

We will have to live with the consequences of these poor choices for the next two years.

In spite of the times I was wrong, I did turn out to be right about one thing--polls. Generally speaking the pollsters did predict some Democrat gains, but very few predicted a complete sweep of both the House and the Senate. Actually, the pollsters and pundits were all over the board, predicting anything from minimal gains in the House all the way to a 50 seat gain in the House and a 10 seat gain in the Senate.

Based upon my informal conversation with some voters in a restaurant recently, I still think there is a significant segment of the electorate that feeds bogus information to pollsters.