Capital Letter
governor of Texas, Bill Clements, an irascible Republican who was running for reelection to a second term. It was a lousy year to be a Republican, given the national recession, but right up until the weekend before the vote, Tarrance's polls showed his client cruising toward victory.</br></br>When Election Day came, however, Clements got swamped by a tidal wave of Democratic voters. A few weeks later, Tarrance saw the vanquished governor at a meeting of the Republican Governors' Association and coined a memorable line when asked how their first post-election session went. "It was like being Napoleon's intelligence chief after Waterloo," Tarrance said.</br></br>Tarrance's remarkable candor offers a benchmark as the campaign of 2000 heats up. Over the next 14 months, a small army of pollsters will chart the mood of America and offer insights into the psyches of every imaginable demographic slice of the electorate to candidates hungry for the clues that will turn a close contest into victory. The luckiest among them will end up with the unofficial title of "pollster to the president," which will bring fame and no little fortune.</br></br>But the law of averages says that somewhere along the way, some of these pollsters will get it wrong -- a single poll perhaps, a strategic insight almost certainly, even possibly a whole race, although the odds weigh heavily against that, given the round-the- clock sampling that marks the conclusion of any truly competitive race. You wouldn't guess it from talking to them, however.</br></br>in the polling business recently to ask what happens when things go wrong. The calls produced few confessional tales of the race that got away or the poll that went awry. As Mark Mellman,a Democratic pollster, put it, "More often than not it's a matter of interpretation. The numbers aren't usually wrong." Even though every pollster knows that one poll in five is likely to be outside the margin of error, the bad ones mostly have disappeared into the mists of memory.