US presidential race: nobody's a sure thing

LET'S call them the Everyone-Knew (EK) who-was-going-to-win US presidential elections when referring to those races to the White House where most of the pollsters, the media, and the rest of the political class in Washington could have made big money betting on the winner. It wasn't only the results of the opinion polls that made it clear that Democratic president Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) would beat Republican challenger Barry Goldwater (who won only in six states) in 1964; or that Republican White House occupant Richard Nixon would electorally decimate and bury Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern (who carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia) in 1972.

Journalists who had covered those or other EK elections - like the 1984 race when Republican president Ronald Reagan crushed Democrat Walter Mondale (who won DC and his own state of Minnesota) in a landslide, or the one in 1996 when Democratic president Bill Clinton delivered a massive electoral blow to Republican Bob Dole - recall that the reason they could get the results right before Election Day had to do not only with the results of the opinion polls that predicted correctly the outcome.

You could get a sense that one side was winning and the other was losing by observing the body language of the candidates, the way they interacted with the media and with voters, the size of the crowds that attended their rallies as well as a general sense of the historical context (for example, it has historically been difficult to beat an incumbent president such as LBJ or Mr Nixon). The big losers in 1964, 1972, 1984 and 1996, admitted to reporters that they had figured out that they would soon become the proverbial also-rans even before the votes were counted.