Listening to the news this morning and apparently Hillary Clinton is now campaigning like it’s done and dusted and she’s basically cruising to the wire.
At little history lesson for her might be worth contemplating.
On election night 1948, most Americans went to bed thinking the Governor of New York and Republican candidate Thomas Dewey would be sworn in as President. Why not? That was what the polls were saying. That was the zeitgeist. The experts and talking heads had told them that it was in the bag.
Not so fast….
Over breakfast the next morning reality hit with the news that in fact President Truman had been returned for another term.
Another more recent example as to why it’s dangerous to cruise….
Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election in a landslide despite trailing Jimmy Carter in public opinion polls two weeks earlier, so polls cannot be trusted to predict election results.
“…Polls taken in October 1980 showed Democrat Jimmy Carter holding as much as an eight-point lead over Republican Ronald Reagan (a Gallup poll two weeks before the election had Carter at 47% and Reagan at 39%), yet Reagan won a landslide victory in the general election, beating Carter 489 to 49 in electoral votes and by almost 10% in the popular vote. (It should be noted that 6.6% of the popular vote also went to a third-party candidate, John Anderson.)