Election results not surprising

I should have put Meg's name in the title of this week's column because I'm sure SHE was certainly surprised. Meg (last name unknown) was some kind of operative for the Chuck Hassebrook gubernatorial campaign and wrote a letter of protest to this newspaper's editor, Bruce Crosby, after a column I wrote appeared. In that column, I said that a poll taken by CBS/New York Times showed Hassebrook losing the election by 20 percentage points. Meg wrote a pretty pithy letter in response.

She said the poll I quoted wasn't really a poll. That it was unscientific and inaccurate and used unreliable methodology. She said they wouldn't pitch something this skewed to any member of the media as a poll. In other words, she was disrespecting my perspective as many of you do from time to time.

She went on to say that all credible polling had Chuck Hassebrook within the margin of error; in other words, within 3 or 4 points of the Republican candidate, Pete Ricketts and also said this was one of the most competitive races Nebraska has seen in decades.

Meg was wrong on all points. The polls her camp were using were obviously flawed methodologically, not mine, and it wasn't a very competitive race at all with Ricketts winning by 20 percentage points, which is what the poll I quoted predicted.

Now this is typical behavior from campaign operatives. They quote polls most favorable to their side and ignore polls that aren't. It doesn't have anything to do with methodology or being scientific or accurate, it has to do with pumping up the troops on your side. You've got to convince your workers that you're close in an election so they'll keep on working and you can't do that quoting polls that show your side 20 percentage points behind.

This is the same mistake the Republicans made in the last presidential election. Their polling showed them ahead of Obama when all objective polling didn't but they were convinced they were right and all the other polls were wrong. Nate Silver, the polling guru, had Obama winning comfortably which he did but Republican operatives were denying that right up until the time the television networks declared Obama the winner.

It's hard to be objective when your money is on one candidate over another.

This was another sea change in American politics like we've seen so often before. The experts call it maintaining checks and balances within the government because the American people are hesitant to give one party all the power because then the party in power could literally do anything it wanted. For the past 70 years, since 1945, the legislative and executive branch of government has been controlled by the same party for only 20 of those years. Most of the time Congress has been controlled by one party and the Presidency by the other. This either forces compromise or ends up in nothing getting done but the people would obviously rather see nothing get done than to have one party run rough-shod over the American electorate.

There's no doubt this last election was a repudiation of President Obama, his policies and his general style of governing. Many of the Republican candidates didn't even mention their opponents, focusing solely on the President, and that was good politics. When your opponent has a weakness, you attack that weakness and keep on attacking it for as long as it exists. Obama's perceived weakness never went away and the Republicans capitalized on it.

But now they must act in the best interest of ALL Americans while they're looking over their shoulders at 2016.