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Edited Date/Time
1/24/2012 12:14pm
John McCain will win the presidential election, Kellyanne Conway, one of the country’s most respected Republican pollsters, tells Newsmax.
Even before McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, Conway was telling clients and select Republican groups and members of Congress that McCain would win.
In the past, Conway’s predictions have been eerily accurate. In the 2004 presidential race, she won the Washington Post’s Crystal Ball Award. Nine days before the election, she predicted the precise outcome in the popular vote — 51 percent for George Bush and 48 percent for John Kerry.
Conway is president and CEO of the Polling Co., a firm she founded. But she doesn’t base her predictions on every fluctuation of the polls. Rather, she looks to polls to tell her what qualities voters care about in a candidate. Then she applies her own political instincts to the results.
“I predicted the 2004 race not based on horse race numbers,” Conway says. “I stopped looking at horse race numbers, including my own polls. Because they all said the same thing, as they do now: 48-46, 47-47, 50-45, 45-48. It’s always going to be tighter than a shrink-wrapped mummy.”
Instead, she says, "I look at what the polls say about attributes. I noticed in 2004 that George W. Bush led John Kerry by double digits for eight straight months on the question of who is more likely to take a position and stick with it." Conway decided that in the 2004 election, such consistency was “treasured currency to voters.” After all, it was the first presidential election since the 9/11 attacks. “There’s so much uncertainty in the world,” she reasoned. “I didn’t believe people wanted to invite more uncertainly and insecurity in their national leadership.”
In particular, Conway figured that Kerry’s reputation as a flip-flopper would matter to women.
“Women don’t like to rock the boat politically or otherwise, and particularly for women voters, they were going to look for a more sure-footed anchor in the storm,” she says. “To women, a flip-flopper is the functional equivalent of the guy who never calls, and always changes his mind.”
A Focus on Leadership
Fast forwarding to 2008, Conway says voters still want those attributes of steadiness, consistency, and principled leadership in their president.
“Now instead of focusing on likeability in the campaign, we’re seeing a focus on leadership,” she says. “Instead of covering biography, we’re covering experience. Instead of only hearing about hope, we’re talking about the Hanoi Hilton again. In other words, we’re talking about what credentials really matter to most voters.”
http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/kellyanne_conway/2008/09/22/133250.html
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