victory for Alf Landon over incumbent President Franklin Roosevelt, which also was almost exactly wrong.

The reason people wonder is that the nation is undergoing a transition in terms of how we communicate, and how we are accessible. Polling relies on the ability to assemble a truly random sample. Until fairly recently, random telephone calls accomplished this nicely, as nearly everyone had a landline phone.

Today, a sizeable and growing segment of the population, mostly young, is accessible primarily through a cell phone or on social media. This Pew survey from 2007 found 49 percent of those in the 18-29 age group in this category back then, with the percentages thinning out quickly among older people.

This Scripps Howard News Service piece by Ben Boychuk argues that we’re being set up for a big polling fail. This, he says, is because “too many pollsters use outmoded turnout models and flawed samples.”

But a lot of other people are warning, “Not so fast.”

Pollsters today are using sophisticated methods and tools such as Census data to analyze information and account for discrepancies. This piece discusses some of this and notes pollsters are even counting negative and positive tweets on a candidate.

And the Atlantic piece I mentioned earlier notes that a close analysis of the 1936 Alf Landon fail shows the convention wisdom about it — that it relied too much on telephone respondents at a time when telephones were too new, rare and mostly owned by Republicans — is false. The culprit was a survey mailed out to millions, to which a disproportionate number of Republicans responded.

The Atlantic piece ends by saying, “Statistical and polling methods have improved dramatically since 1936, making the chance of an error of this magnitude — for reasons of technological penetration or any other — highly unlikely.”

Given the speculation this year about polling and shifting communication patterns, as well as the seeming witch's brew of methods to deal with it all, the only thing I can say with certainty is that time will tell, and that we will all know for sure in about a month.

it bring any clarity to an issue that seems dominated by nonsense on both sides.

Democrats say requiring voters to show a picture I.D. before receiving a ballot would disenfranchise many poor and disabled voters, who tend to vote for Democrats. The Brennan Center For Justice estimates as many as 10 percent of the voting population lacks such identification.

Really? If I go out on the street anywhere in this country and look around, one of every 10 people I see is not going to be carrying a picture I.D.? And this would be someone who normally votes in elections but won’t be able to because of this?

Try functioning without identification and see how far you get. This is an age in which a photo I.D. is required for a long list of everyday activities from banking to buying some over-the-counter medications to hopping on an airplane. Much of the time, I can’t even make a credit card purchase without also showing a clerk my driver license.

Yes, there are people out there without I.D., who want to vote. But I think a more believable percentage came out of the recent Franklin & Marshall College poll in Pennsylvania. It found that only 2 percent of voters there say they lack proper identification.

Still, it is important that those 2 percent be allowed to vote. That’s why Pennsylvania’s voter I.D. law requires the state to issue a valid I.D. to any voter who requests one. This seems reasonable, provided they can easily get one in time.

But on the other side are Republicans who claim identification is necessary in order to stem voter fraud. They have a hard time demonstrating this is a real problem.

In Kansas, Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach says 221 such incidents occurred there between 1997 and 2010. That’s an awfully small number when spread out across 13 years.

However, Kobach makes the argument in a Washington Post op-ed that the number is not insignificant when applied to certain extremely close elections, where small numbers could change the outcome.

He also references evidence found in Minnesota that 341 felons illegally voted in the 2008 election.

Underlying all of this are opinion polls that show Americans clearly want voter I.D. laws and see them as useful. The Franklin Marshall College poll found that 87 percent of voters in Pennsylvania knew about that state’s requirement, and 59 percent of registered voters approved of it.

Kobach referenced a SurveyUSA poll in 2010 that found 85 percent of Kansans supported it.

As usual when it comes to politics, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of all the arguments.

It would be naïve to think there aren’t people out there trying to affect election results through fraud. There are examples of this throughout history. However, widespread voter fraud is extremely difficult to carry out. The days of political voting machines that could organize bosses, get election judges appointed and stuff ballot boxes are probably over. There are too many eyes out there, including every cell phone camera in the nation, and electronic voting machines are difficult to hack.

But it also seems a stretch to say wide swaths of the country would be disenfranchised by requiring an I.D.

The bottom line is voter I.D. laws would be one more tool against minor fraud. But they have to come with some guarantee that every voter who needs one will have ready access to a card.

In most states, however, the issue simply doesn’t seem worth all the energy people are expending.

presidential primary. How often do you see Mitt Romney or Barack Obama in Concord these days?

The real goal should be to become Ohio.

Somehow, the folks in the Buckeye State are so evenly divided that for 70 years it has been almost impossible for a presidential candidate to win without them. That’s why both candidates are spending so much time there right now.

But being a true swing state with 18 electoral votes means more than just a lot of rah-rah rallies with marching bands and streamers. It means real bucks for Buckeyes — at least it has since Obama took office.

Last month, the administration announced the winner of a $30 million pilot grant to begin creation of “manufacturing innovation institutes.” It happened to be a consortium based in Youngstown, Ohio.

If you own a small business in Ohio, you’re in luck. The Washington Post reported recently that 2,726 loans were approved this year for Ohio businesses. This is 500 more than were given in Florida, another swing state with a lot more people.

Two years ago, a guy who operates a company that makes ricotta cheese in Cleveland got a record $5.49 million SBA loan. Obama called that “one of the tastiest investments” Washington ever made. Perhaps the quickest way to a voter is through his stomach.

Which brings up another point. It isn’t just during an election year when swing states benefit. Voters aren’t stupid. You have to keep working with them even when the voting booths are packed up and stored away.

The Post said Obama has been in Ohio 29 times since taking office. That still lags behind President George W. Bush, who visited 35 times during his first term. But when Obama showed up in 2009, he brought along $1 billion in stimulus funds. In 2010 the administration awarded $400 million to restart a train line between Cincinnati and Cleveland that hadn’t run in 40 years. Ohio was one of only two states that benefitted directly from the rail initiative. The other was Florida. The Republican governors of both states rejected the money.

Earlier this year, Obama almost made a gaffe by flying into an Air National Guard base where his budget (should Congress ever again pass a budget) would have cut a fleet of planes. While locals tried to raise a stink, the president quickly promised to find a new mission for the base.

Do you think he would do the same for Hill Air Force Base or any other Utah facility if it were on the chopping block?

For that matter, would the auto industry have been bailed out if it was centered in Richfield? Maybe, given the negative ripple effect an industry collapse was widely believed ready to cause four years ago. But Ohio got a good share of that money, too, which the president is quick to remind everyone about each time he makes a speech there.

It may be, as the administration insists, that all this Ohio largesse is based on the merits of competitive bidding, and that politics played no role. Maybe Brian Reis could have gotten three SBA loans totaling $3.9 million for his Ohio potato chip company even if he lived in Alaska.

But just to be safe, you other states may want to check people at the border and accept only those new residents who lend balance to your political profile.

Of course, there is a flaw to that plan, beyond the obvious observation that the nation is going broke. Once someone is elected to a second term, there is little incentive to keep the money flowing.

But politics also seems to saturate President Barack Obama’s tax returns. He gave 21.8 percent of his sizeable (by average American standards) income to charity, according to his 2011 returns.

That’s an impressive amount, as was the 14 percent in 2010 and the 25.1 percent in 2009, when he donated his entire Nobel Peace Prize earnings to charities.

But go back to the days before he was contemplating the White House and you get a different picture. As this Washington Post piece reports, Obama gave 1.2 percent in 2004, 1.4 percent in ’03 and 0.4 percent in ’02.

Romney hasn’t released tax returns prior to ’11, but his campaign says he averaged giving 13.5 percent of his income to charity over the last 20 years.

Reaction to this has been fairly muted from the left, while journalists more sympathetic to Romney have weighed in with admiration. This piece by John Podhoretz of the New York Post, said, “Mitt Romney is an extraordinarily, remarkably, astonishingly generous man. A good man. Maybe even a great man.

“That is all. There is no ‘but.’ Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant, stupid or a liar.”

Podhoretz said it would be wrong to cynically claim Romney’s charity is nothing more than a tax shelter. Nothing is being sheltered. Once the money is given to charity, it is gone. All you get is a deduction that, at the highest marginal rate, means you are excused from paying taxes on 35 percent of the money you gave away.

Over 20 years, he writes, this would likely mean the Romneys gave up $30 million in income to charity.

Brian Siegel, writing in the Daily Illini, the student paper of the University of Illinois, took Obama campaign manager David Axelrod to task for criticizing Romney for paying a higher tax rate than he ought to have.

“Let me get this straight, we are supposed to be mad that he didn’t claim all of his refund for the charitable contributions he made? I almost feel bad for Romney. He’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. God forbid he takes his full tax break and his effective tax rate dips below 10 percent — it would be political suicide.”

In truth, this is a minor side-note to the presidential campaign of 2012. Even to compare charitable contributions among candidates seems a bit crass. They can serve as a window to a person true character, but that window reveals only a small bit of what might be valuable as leader of the free world. My guess is many of us know some extremely generous people we otherwise wouldn’t trust with an arsenal of nuclear weapons or with crafting a nation’s fiscal policy or dealing with Iran.

Romney’s reluctance to release these returns, however, is curious. It’s no surprise that he’s an extremely wealthy man, or that much of his income is derived from investments that entitle him to a lower tax rate. However, he seems to have a sense of modesty about his contributions, entirely in keeping with his religion, that makes him reluctant to talk about how much he gives.

was rather clumsy of Romney to identify the 47 percent of people who pay no income tax as supporters of Barack Obama who believe they are victims entitled to something from the government. That isn’t true. There are disabled veterans, senior citizens and, certainly, poor people on that list.

But amid the political dog pile, no one seems to be paying attention to the real issue here. Romney touched on it, but even he isn’t grasping hold. It is that the U.S. tax code is in drastic need of revision.

To say the code has reached Biblical proportions is to exaggerate the Bible. Experts disagree on how many words it contains. The Tax Foundation puts it at about 10 million. The Bible has only 774,746.

And those 10 million words aren’t nearly as uplifting or full of hope.

I would venture to say no one single person understands the entire code. Millions have to hire someone to prepare their tax forms each year.

Is that the best way to fund a treasury?

Back to those 47 percent (The Tax Policy Center puts it at 46 percent).  About half of them are below the poverty line. A lot of the rest take advantage of tax credits and various deductions, and some of them are wealthy people who earn much of their money from investments or capital gains.

It is legitimate to question whether even the poor should pay a nominal amount of income tax, just so they can have a legitimate stake in the issues surrounding the tax and what it funds.

The problem with that is the poor do already pay plenty in other taxes. Why does their exemption from one tax alone disqualify them from understanding the burdens of taxation?

No, what Romney and Obama both ought to address is how inefficient and unfair the income tax has become and to propose plans for its revision. The odd thing is that Romney chose a running mate with a record of addressing tough budget problems with radical proposals. Questions about income tax reform and fairness should be right in his wheelhouse.

poll in which Americans had ranked foreign policy matters 15th on a list of their top concerns.

“As a nation, we consider 14 other things more important than our dealings with other nations,” I wrote, “14 things more important than whether Osama bin Laden will strike again or what to do about (Slobodan) Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, or whether to trade with China. … Yet if there is any single thing that quickly could bring good times to an end in this country it is a foreign crisis … or a terrorist attack on our own soil.”

You don’t need a Ph.D. in political science to look back through the last 12 years and see what that 2000 election should have focused on.

Foreign diplomacy is to the federal government what curbs, gutters and storm drains are to City Hall. On fair weather days, when all is calm, nobody thinks about them. But when they go wrong, people can think of nothing else.

This past week proved the point again, as fanatics stormed the U.S. embassy in Libya, killing the ambassador and two others. And we thought Libyans were grateful to us for helping them overthrow a dictator.

One other thing has happened to me personally over the last 12 years. My oldest son grew up, passed the Foreign Service exam and now works at a U.S. consulate in China.

I’m sure he doesn’t tell me everything that occupies his time. He is fluent in Mandarin and Korean and his post is near the border of North Korea. But he does tell me about the more mundane parts of his job — examining applicants for visas to come to the United States, visiting expatriate Americans in the area and providing an official presence at local events. He tries to spread goodwill.

He lives in an apartment in the center of town, with his wife and my two grandchildren. I worry about them. But I would worry more for the United States if we didn’t have people like them, and like Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya who gave his life for his country.

I have returned to Washington several times for similar State Department briefings. Each time, I heard a secretary of state express thanks to workers who put country ahead of more comfortable lives here at home. On one such visit, we met with John Negroponte, who had just accepted the assignment to become Iraq’s first ambassador after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I marveled that anyone would willingly take on such an assignment.

“I will work with the people of Iraq to enable them to take ownership in their own country,” he told us stoically.

That was eight years ago, and we all know how elusive that goal has been.

As a nation, we’ve become a bit more aware of foreign policy issues over the past 12 years. A recent Gallup Poll found that terrorism and international issues finished fourth on a list of concerns.

But I still don’t think many Americans get it. They focus on the size of the defense budget but give scant attention to the State Department, which gets about 1 percent of the total pie.

I guess that’s human nature. We focus more on the Police Department than on ways to keep people from committing crime.

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in the preface to the most recent State Department budget proposal, diplomats “reduce the threat of nuclear weapons, stabilize conflict zones, help secure our borders, fight international criminal trafficking, counter violent extremism, protect and assist Americans overseas” and make free trade possible in many areas.

Too bad we notice only when things go wrong.

But I’m pretty sure Obama didn’t cause hurricane Isaac. Not unless the CIA has made some monumental scientific breakthrough it has kept secret. The hurricane shut down refineries along the Gulf Coast for a period of time. That disrupted markets and led to a jump in prices worldwide.

It’s also likely to be a temporary jump. Baring some other catastrophe, war or similar event, prices are expected to fall as summertime demand drops off, experts say.

If you’re trying to tie today’s rise in prices to the other team’s energy policies, the other team may throw that back in your face during tomorrow’s decline in prices.

In reality, even if Obama had approved more offshore permits and the Keystone Pipeline, those things would have affected long-term production, not short-term.

The nation’s highest gasoline prices, in real terms, came under the George W. Bush administration. That was a bubble that burst during volatile economic times, bringing the price down to about $1.84 in short order, and just in time for Obama to be elected. So now his political foes are comparing today’s prices to the time when Obama was elected.

For the most part, politicians are at the mercy of market forces on gas prices, and those are at the mercy of world events.

Long-term decisions are indeed important, however. On that score, the president hasn’t done much to ensure cheap energy for Americans, nor has he done much to spur a move toward cheaper alternatives, such as natural gas.

However, long-term issues don’t translate well into election-season bumper stickers — but those bumper stickers will look silly if prices begin to fall between now and November.

Both political parties mentioned it during their respective national conventions, each trying to blame each other for the fact it hasn’t gone anywhere. And now there is a growing feeling that Simpson-Bowles may just be the nation’s best hope for backing away from the fiscal cliff later this year. (Read this analysis from Govexec.com, or this one from WNYC.org.)

In a nutshell, their plan would raise Social Security’s retirement age to 69 and reduce benefits, but not for a while. It would cut defense, cut farm subsidies, increase the federal gasoline tax by 15 cents a gallon and remove a lot of tax deductions, such as for interest paid on mortgages.

The flip side is it would reduce marginal income tax rates considerably. It would cut $2 to $3 for every $1 it raises through new taxes.

The details aren’t necessarily important because they are bound to change through negotiations. But the basic idea is for a centrist approach that distributes the pain, raises revenues and keeps from destroying economic recovery through onerous tax increases.

Pass something like this and you won’t have to worry about ending Bush-era tax cuts or the temporary payroll tax cuts or across-the-board cuts to public services — all of which will happen automatically at the end of the year unless Congress acts. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted these automatic things would lead to a new recession.

But to get there, both sides are going to have to willingly rewrite history a bit and shut up about it.

Nancy Pelosi would have to forget she called the plan “Simply unacceptable.” The president, should he be re-elected, would have to forget he set the commission up for failure by requiring two-thirds of its members to approve it, and he will have to forget he ignored it for nearly two years.

Republicans would have to forget how they said the plan was a non-starter because it raises taxes. Should he be elected, Paul Ryan would have to forget he sat on the commission and voted against the report.

They could do this and allow each other to claim they wanted it all along, and the nation could re-establish its good credit rating and begin whistling down the yellow-brick road.

However, most important of all, the many and varied special interests affected by the plan would have to give a little.

Actually, that may be the biggest reason of all to give a Simpson-style horselaugh to the idea.

The only way to solve the nation’s budget mess is through pain, and special interests scream in pain louder than anyone.

If any group of politicians is capable of ignoring those screams, however, it might be a lame-duck Congress meeting for the last time.

They also might be the nation’s last best chance to avoid a very unhappy New Year.

Blahous said we’re rapidly approaching the point where a political solution to Social Security’s woes is no longer possible. As it is, such a thing would require huge concessions by both sides. That means, “either progressives must accept substantial benefit growth reductions, conservatives substantial tax increases, or both.”

Because neither party is expected to hold a veto-proof majority in the near future, compromise is essential, but it’s also politically impractical.

Blahous uses figures and charts to argue that even the toughest solutions proposed today no longer will work.

“Individuals now planning their financial futures, whether as taxpayers or as beneficiaries, should be pricing in a substantial risk that the federal government will not be able to maintain Social Security as a self-financing, stand-alone program over the long term,” he wrote. “If Social Security financing corrections are not enacted in 2013, or at the very latest by 2015, it becomes fairly likely that they will not be enacted at all.”

Instead, the program might have to proceed as one that relies forever on subsidies from the general fund.

But that means it also would have to compete each year against other national priorities, rather than exist in its own dedicated trust fund (which until now has been routinely plundered to pay for other government expenses).

He paints a bleak picture, indeed. Most public reports are that the program’s real problems won’t begin until 2033. This, Blahous says, makes it seem as if the problems are remote and easily solved. That is not true.

Unfortunately, what is true is that neither party is coming to grips with the idea that, when it comes to the nation’s elderly, dithering is the cruelest act of all.

Words matter, especially when they mean different things to different sets of people.

This political season is Exhibit A. To a conservative, there are few principles more bedrock than the one that says people control the government, not the other way around. To the extent government does put constraints on actions, it is only through the consent of the governed, and certain rights cannot be taken away regardless of what the majority says.

So it’s entirely understandable that they would react strongly to a video shown at

the Democratic National Convention that asserted, “Government is the only thing we all belong to.”

That’s pretty much complete backwards of how it really is.

Watch the video, however, and it’s clear the narrator didn’t mean anything greater than that we are all Americans and all citizens of our respective communities, even if we go to different churches and belong to different organizations.

The wording was tone deaf, however.

You could go out on the street and ask 10 people how they feel about the statement and probably nine of them would react negatively. Word it just a little differently, however, and the results would be quite different.

The same thing applies to liberal thought. That explains why, when Mitt Romney said earlier this year he wanted consumers to have choices because, "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,” his critics pounced.

He meant that people should be able to demand the best services available and should be free to reject one that doesn’t deliver.

My guess is a lot of Americans agree, especially when it comes to their cable company or corner grocer. But the way he phrased it not only spoke to the way liberals portray him as a wealthy venture capitalist who has fired people through reorganizations, it spoke to a basic liberal philosophy about preserving jobs despite economic realities.

In neither case did the person being quoted intend to say what opponents attribute to them. And yet it may not be entirely unfair to use their remarks in a larger context.

The words probably betray underlying assumptions. They likely do reveal greater philosophies, even if they don’t have the literal meaning critics want to pin on them.

That applies, as well, to the raucous debate Democrats had over whether potential is “God-given” and whether that should be part of the party’s platform. To some people, those words matter a lot, too.

Until both sides learn to study each other’s language and frame arguments in more palatable ways, the nation won’t be able to solve some of its most pressing problems.