What If The Polls Are Wrong Tuesday?

The CBS News/New York Times poll released on Sunday shows Barack Obama leading John McCain nationally 54 percent to 41 percent.

The daily Rasmussen Reports update for Monday is Obama 52%-46%, while Gallup's final presidential estimate is Obama by 11 points.

The average of polling from Real Clear Politics shows the race at 51% to 42%.

And then there is the poll from Investors Business Daily which has the race at Obama 46.7% and McCain 44.6% with 8.7% not sure when released two days before the election.

That survey - done by TIPP, a Division of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence - touts it was the most accurate poll of the 2004 race when it came within 3/10s of a point of President Bush's actual margin of victory.

And we remember how dead-on the pollsters were when Obama was supposed to close out Senator Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.

The pollsters themselves are asking themselves the same question: do we really, really REALLY have it right?

Jon Cohen of The Washington Post writes Monday "we could all be wrong -- at least theoretically. Simply put, we may be wrong about who is likely to vote on Tuesday. One of the trickiest parts of political polling is determining which of the people interviewed in pre-election surveys will really vote."

And there's this from Michael Barone, senior writer for U.S. News and World Report, when he appeared on Greta Van Susteren's Fox News Channel program on October 29:

"Polling theory tells us even with perfect sampling, one out of 20 polls will be wrong. That is the results will be outside the margin of error from what you get if you could question the whole population. So we are looking at an imperfect process here."

But the most mind-bending number comes from former Bush White House Advisor Karl Rove in a story for The Wall Street Journal on October 30:

"There has been an explosion of polls this presidential election. Through yesterday (October 29), there have been 728 national polls with head-to-head matchups of the candidates, 215 in October alone. In 2004, there were just 239 matchup polls, with 67 of those in October. At this rate, there may be almost as many national polls in October of 2008 as there were during the entire year in 2004."

I've tried to learn a few lessons from this campaign. I noted some polls in earlier blogs, one that identified issues and two others that gauged the early impact of Sarah Palin on the race. On Daybreak, we've cited the CBS News survey for the sake of consistency.

And we noted The Weekly Reader Student 2008 Poll, but just for historical purposes.

The best thing I think I can do with regards to determining what may happen and what will happen is to quote former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Iraq from years ago:

"..we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."