But consider the fate of a clean-vote television campaign aimed at persuading voters to resist coercive polling tactics, like those that have helped the governing party win every presidential election since the 1920's.
"To hell with the polls, the tactics, and all the rest.
After months of covering the midterm elections through a prism of polls and tactics, pundits will shift their focus to the defeated party's so-called season of "soul-searching".
Mother Jones has a good analysis of push-polling, a tactic whereby taped phone messages invite people to participate in a survey, then present them with loaded questions and spin that favours a given candidate.
Despite the ad campaign and similar tactics, polls indicate American Jews support Obama by a more than 2 1 margin.
Post-election forums at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the campaign e-book "The End of the Line," by Jonathan Martin and Glenn Thrush of the Web site Politico, illustrated the Obama campaign's supremacy on tactics: polling, the use of digital and social media, advertising, identifying voters and getting them to the polls.
Yesterday, posters of the slain councilman from his 2001 campaign were resurrected along sections of the 35th Council District in Prospect Heights and Crown Heights as voters went to the polls, but the tactic did little to help his brother's bid to replace him.
Despite all of the critics' hype and scare tactics, some polls suggest that the public perception of reform is slowly improving.
Have we learned nothing from the Jim Crow era, when legally registered Southern black voters were disenfranchised by similar tactics like poll taxes and literacy tests?
In the meantime, though, they blame their failure to break through on what they see as a combination of Clinton's inspired cynicism and the myopia of a press corps addled by tactics and poll numbers.
The media's reporting about Barack Obama became more positive, but most of it was about the state of the race, opinion polling, the electoral map, tactics and so on.Balanced reporting does not mean that two political candidates should have an equal number of positive and negative reports.
