Polls, Polls, Polls

Luckily for the residents of Happy Valley lots of Penn State student-athletes are doing their best to keep our minds off current events. Many of the young women and men competing for Nittany Nation are excelling at their chosen sports and doing well in their own polls.

The Penn State football team is highly ranked for the first time in years and by tonight could be in the top 10 in the College Football Playoff rankings, the two teams ranked just ahead of them having both lost this past weekend. There are those who believe a trip to the Rose Bowl is imminent. I know, I know… Indiana, Indiana, Indiana.

As I write this the men’s hockey team is ranked number two in the country in the only poll that counts – the PairWise Rankings.  Number TWO!  Even though it’s still very early in the season Guy Gadowsky, his staff, and most importantly the players deserve great credit for building a powerful team in just their fifth season of Division I play.

The women’s field hockey squad spent this past weekend beating Maryland in the Big Ten Championship Game, getting an automatic berth into the NCAA Tournament, and winning its conference-leading seventh Big Ten Tournament title.

The defending national champion women’s soccer side earned a share of their 18th Big Ten regular season conference title and start play this weekend in the NCAA Division I Women’s Soccer Championship.

The defending national champion (notice a pattern here) wrestling team starts its season in a dual meet this Friday at West Point against Army. What a great place to begin the quest for their sixth national title in the last seven years.

And those are just the Penn State student-athletes. Several local scholastic squads and individuals are achieving accolades in their respective sports, including St. Joseph’s Catholic Academy girls’ cross country team which won its second straight PIAA Class A championship on Saturday, and Sera Mazza who won the individual state title.

Lots of great accomplishments by these fine student-athletes to celebrate and enjoy. Almost makes you forget that, oh yes, today is Election Day.

And not just any Election Day. Today is that every-four-years, extra-special Election Day when we all get to vote for the President of the United States.

The people who predict such things are saying they expect a massive voter turnout today. However, if for some reason you are one of those people who doesn’t cast a ballot in this election, I wrote a column for you last year.

But if you trudge to your appointed polling place today so you can say you took part in this wonderful experiment called democracy, I have some good news and some not-so-good news for you.

The good news is that by tomorrow, barring any Bush-Gore level issues, this long campaign season will be over. We will have a definitive answer to the question, “Who will be the next President of the United States?”

The not-so-good news is that you have a much better chance of NOT approving the presidential election result than you do of approving it.

Here’s why. Most sources show the United States voting-eligible population turnout rates for presidential elections hasn’t surpassed 64 percent in more than a century (before women could vote). For outlandish comparisons sake, let’s project this election results in an enormous 70 percent turnout rate – a record not seen since the 1800s.

Next, no presidential candidate in more than 30 years has won more than 54 percent of the popular vote. But let’s go back in time and project that one of the current presidential candidates wins this election by a Nixon vs. McGovern landslide margin – 60 percent.

Let’s do the math here… 70 percent of eligible voters vote and 60 percent for one candidate. Meaning that even if you have a once-in-a-century turnout, and a huge one-sided vote, only 42 percent of the voting-eligible population will have voted for whomever becomes the next president. And if the turnout stays in the more expected 63 percent range, with the winning candidate getting 54 percent of the vote, only 34 percent of the voting-eligible population will have voted for the next president.

In other words, it is twice as likely that you will be unhappy or ambivalent about the result because you didn’t vote for whomever wins. Just a heads-up that this may help explain the inordinate amount of long faces and sad posts in social media you will encounter.

As a side note, it’s historically interesting, given the current animosity between the two major national political parties, that in the 1790s Thomas Jefferson and James Madison formed an opposition party to the then-dominant Federalist Party. The name of this new political party? The Democratic-Republican Party.

Whatever happens though, one thing is for certain – come tomorrow morning the federal government will be alive and well and open for business. It is the largest employer in the country and 99.9 percent of its employees have a job regardless of who’s president.

And remember, as you make your way to the polls here in Centre County, I have three words for you to think about: Indiana, Indiana, Indiana.