Attack of the Normal-Sized Woman

Another of those presidential primaries is scheduled for tomorrow, but I doubt that will prevent anyone from still talking about the last one.

You see, everybody thought one guy would win, but instead of that, his opponent did.

In the week that followed, media people began assuring "never again" would they make such a mistake and they spent no small amount of time wondering aloud how such a thing could have happened. The best part of this, for me, was that they mostly discussed it among themselves. This makes sense because it was their loss of credibility that was most evident and important to them.

Politics may all be local, but reality is downright personal.

A number of possible reasons for the disparity between the polls and the actual results were offered, but by now most everyone has settled on it being women. I'm fairly confident that we'll never know for sure, if only because we can't check how people voted against how they said they would or did. That's the thing about secret balloting.

No one is talking much any more about the Bradley or Dinkins effect, where people say they'll vote for an African-American but don't, and I don't know if that has anything to do with it or not. Iowa, where Obama won, sheds no light on that, either, since it was a public caucus and not a secret vote.

Twice in the week of continuing coverage I heard interviews with actual pollsters, who make a damn decent living coming up with numbers for the newscasters and pundits to talk about. The guy I like best, the one who runs the Pew polls, came up with I thought was the best answer, though that may be mostly because I like him. According to him, his initial thought was that more of Hillary's supporters simply refused to answer or take part in the polls.

To get the thousand or so answers from which to develop a statistically relevant sample, the pollsters have to ask lots of people. The overwhelming number of people politely (or not) refuse, and it's entirely possible that a large chunk of women, whom we’ll say voted for Hillary, were put off by the people conducting the polls.

It may have been something as simple as them not caring to discuss their intimate, political ideas with some kid covered with tattoos.

The other thing, not to be overlooked, is that the polls all stopped gathering information a few days before the vote. A lot can happen in a few days, so I’m not willing to think it’s all and only a large number of women flocking to a sister in need. I don’t know anything about women, but I doubt they’re likely to consider gender a trump card.

Most of them already realize they rule the world.