Politics is largely about expectations and rarely about real perception.

One of my favorite things to watch are candidates who aren’t polling well or aren’t raising money (or both) discredit both factors. At the moment Senator Chris Dodd is on Chris Matthews program talking about how polls don’t matter. He doesn’t believe in them and said something to the effect of “people in Iowa don’t want a national newspaper telling them how to vote.”

He supported his reasoning by saying his own private phone banking has found that 70,000 people they’ve talked to across the country say they haven’t made up their minds yet on the candidates. So Dodd showed his disbelief in polling by citing polling numbers. Does something about that not sound right to you?

The same thing happens with television and radio ratings. If a TV show is doing horrible in the ratings studios, producers & actors point to critical acclaim. Of course if a show has no critical acclaim they point to the ratings! If both of those arguments don’t work they dig as hard as they can to find a group within the ratings that likes them. “We killed with men named Steve aged 18 – 34 which is the only group that matters to advertisers”.

But you just supported your disbelief in ratings by citing other ratings that make you look good.

Presidential candidates should just start saying “I am getting my butt handed to me in the polling but the important thing is my mother likes me and she has told all her friends to vote for me.”

Money is the other factor that is always relative. When a candidate doesn’t have money they go around telling people how little money matters to a campaign. Before Barack Obama showed he could raise money the Clinton spent an obscene amount of money in her Senate re-election big simply to show people how much she was able to raise and how easy it would be.

The moment Obama announced his numbers the Clinton camp was going around telling people the Senator didn’t need that much as she was outspent “two to one” in her first Senate bid and she would do fine regardless.

Frankly I don’t know that the polling done today or the money raised yesterday really will mean a whole lot in January, but I do there is little better indicator of how people will vote than calling them up and asking them. There are flaws, of course, but its a pretty darn good indicator if you call enough of them over time.

Money too isn’t a bad indicator of the viability of a candidate. The more money you have the better you can do things to help you get elected.

In the end I know these candidates cannot just come out and say “listen Chris, I don’t have a shot in hell, I am just doing this to write a book in six months and fly around in private Jets on someone else’s dime” but they come across pretty silly saying polls don’t matter and finding all kinds of outlandish explanations as to why. Especially when they cite polls.