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Carter's pollster, Patrick Caddell, on the other hand, still stands by his figures, which reflected a close race right up until the weekend before the election. On the Saturday before the election, four days after he had come off second best in the debate with Reagan, Carter was about even with Reagan, insists Caddell. But by Sunday night, he says, Carter's campaign had collapsed. Caddell's reason: the hostage issue was again in the news and again unsettled, thus reviving the public's frustration with Carter as a whole. Caddell's data shows Carter suddenly dropping five points behind by Sunday night, with another five-point collapse by Monday night.
The public opinion industry has christened Caddell's thesis the "big bang" theory of the campaign: 8 million voters moving to Reagan in 48 hours. To a large extent, most public opinion researchers support this theory, although many do so with major qualifications.
Says TIME'S pollster Daniel Yankelovich: "There is every reason to assume that is what happened. When people are conflicted, they procrastinate. And that's what they did in this election."
Warren Mitofsky, director in charge of the polling effort run by CBS News and shared by the New York Times, has produced a new opinion survey that seems to substantiate the big bang theory. Re-interviewing 2,651 adults who had been questioned before the election, Mitofsky found that some 13% of the voters changed their minds in the last few days of the campaign and that Reagan got the lion's share of the switchers. Says Mitofsky: "Caddell's thesis is consistent with what CBS found."
The Harris organization, which polled throughout the weekend and on Monday, showed Reagan gaining points right up to Election Day. By Monday night, according to Harris Executive Vice President David Neft, an unpublished Harris survey had Reagan six points ahead of Carter. Others picked up the trend too, and Wirthlin showed a widening gap through the weekend until Monday night when he, like Caddell, pegged the margin at about ten points in Reagan's favor. The Gallup survey, which eleven days before the election had Carter ahead by three points, found Reagan moving from 42% to 44% to 47% in its final survey, taken on Nov. 1.
But although there is agreement on the fact that the gap widened at the end, no one except Caddell and Wirthlin came close to calling the margin. The Harris organization, which is claiming great credit for doing better than other public polls, was four points off Reagan's actual voting percentage, the largest error factor it has ever had in a presidential election. Gallup not only also missed the winner's voting percentage by four points but further erred by saying that Reagan was ahead by a margin of only three points. The margin was, says George Gallup, "a deviation greater than the average deviation of 2.3 percentage points for the 23 national elections covered by the Gallup poll."
Everyone agrees that to some extent the Reagan margin over Carter grew in the last few days before the election. But they disagree over how much, when and why. Indeed, reading from the same computer printouts, CBS News and the New