The magazine of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education • Sunday February 05, 2012

Political March Madness

By Damon Circosta
Published: Mar. 8, 2010

RALEIGH - Candidate filing just ended and already the chattering class is in overdrive on election 2010.

Prognosticators are busy digging through the list of candidates and trying to divine where the competitive contests and possible upsets will happen. Political types are lining up behind their odds-on favorites, sleeper picks and certain bets.

The process is strikingly similar to another springtime ritual: the NCAA bracket challenge.  Soon, basketball fans and even casual hoops watchers will pick winners in the tournament that decides the collegiate national champion.

Watching ESPN or CNN you will notice that both the political pundits and basketball gurus make their pronouncements with a striking degree of certainty. They say things like “Syracuse will make the Final Four” or “the Senate will be in Republican hands in 2011.”

No doubt these pundits do their homework. In both politics and hoops there is a wealth of information to analyze. Basketball has its game statistics, scouting reports and even figures on how teams fare in a particular venue. In politics there are candidate profiles, campaign spending reports and voter registration trends. But for all of the information and all the time spent decoding, we often get things wrong.

It’s not that there isn’t value in analysis. Thinking through the various factors that might shape a contest can shed some light on the probable outcomes. But in politics, as in basketball, we are dealing with human beings. Given that humans are notoriously unpredictable, it is impossible to know the outcome before the contest is held.

In basketball, all of this pre-game analysis does very little harm. It’s not as if star Kentucky point guard John Wall is going to refuse to lace up his shoes because Dick Vitale thinks his team won’t win. 

In politics, however, all the pre-election punditry can do some serious harm.  If the prognosticators talk about a particular candidate having very little chance of success, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  No one wants to support a lost cause.

If the pundits say so, volunteers will head elsewhere, political donors will spend on other races and the candidate will be left with few resources to effectively run her campaign. Even worse, some people won’t even bother to vote in races they think are foregone conclusions.

Though written off, history is filled with stories of candidates who defied the odds.  Abe Lincoln and Harry Truman weren’t favorites. More recently, Senators Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Al Franken of Minnesota won despite forecasts to the contrary.

Elections are exceedingly complex. No TV talking head is going to be able to predict with certainty how things will turn out. But writing off the majority of challengers this early in an election year is a favorite pastime of many political prophesiers.

You never know when a candidate will catch a spark. Like a low-seeded team in the NCAA tournament, previously unheralded candidates can come out of seemingly nowhere to win. It happens every year.

After a hoops team pulls off an upset, coaches often say, “That’s why we play the game.” It’s true in politics as well. Outcomes can’t be known beforehand and it’s why we hold elections in the first place.

Even though the general election is still months away, there will be those who say we already know who the winners will be. And while the folks who try and predict these outcomes may speak with certainty, many of them will be wrong. 

Rather than listening to the pundit class, and possibly staying home, let’s get involved. Let’s not allow their predictions to keep us from getting in the game.