Will there be a groundswell from the unwanted, unpolled unlikelies?

As we are aware, both sides have unleashed the biggest and most aggressive voter-mobilization drives in the history of presidential politics, tapping hundreds of thousands of volunteers and paid organizers. But will the election be decided by the unwanted, unpolled unlikelies. It's possible, as is anything when something is this tight.

If this happens, polls this year were meaningless. That's not right. They were significant in showing the importance of the GOTV, and thus certainly not meaningless.

Watching for a Groundswell

By William Raspberry
November 1, 2004
The Washington Post

Excerpts:

Tomorrow's "too close to call" presidential election may not be so close after all . . . . There's a good chance . . . that it will be decided by the "unwanted, unpolled unlikelies." That, of course, would be great news for challenger John Kerry, who has never had more than a marginal lead in the polls among those considered likely voters.

To start with, the political polls this cycle have tended to undercount Democrats -- in part, according to some reports, because Republicans are more likely to make themselves available to telephone pollsters. Further, college students -- who may be unusually active this election cycle and who may be more inclined to question the direction of the present administration -- are notoriously fused to their unlisted cell phones, meaning that they are unreachable by polling organizations that try to reach specific voters.

But the big thing is a "groundswell of new voters" -- many of whom, though eligible, didn't vote last time. That makes them, in the lexicon of pollsters, "unlikely" to vote this time.

[E]arlier get-out-the-vote drives among communities unused to voting have sometimes led to far more new registrants than actual new voters.

[There is concern about] "suppression tactics" to hold down the vote. These include efforts by party workers to challenge or "intimidate" certain voters and rules enforced by officials to accomplish the same thing -- for instance, by disallowing even a provisional ballot for a person registered in a different precinct.

It's a legitimate worry. Maybe it's only because the accusations are more likely (since the cliffhanger election of four years ago) to be reported by the media, but it does appear that the Republicans in particular are investing more than the usual effort in finding ways to suppress the vote in areas that are predominantly black and poor and thus likelier to vote Democratic.

Will these voters -- many of them first-timers -- allow themselves to be intimidated out of casting ballots? Will long lines at tactically understaffed polling places discourage others? Will significant numbers of would-be voters disqualify themselves by turning up at the wrong place or marking their ballots improperly or failing to respond to a challenge?