PERMANENT FATAL ERRORS.

New Yorker, The, December, 2004 by Louis Menand

"You can't imagine how much time it takes to lie on the floor in a fetal position," Mark Mellman explained to a gathering of political scientists and polling experts at Stanford a week after the Presidential election. Mellman is the C.E.O. of the Mellman Group and, until his services were rendered unnecessary by events, was the lead pollster for the Kerry campaign. He is a friendly and outspoken man, with the look of dishevelment that is associated with brainy enthusiasm, and it was entertaining to imagine him curled in a ball somewhere after November 2nd, trying to forget about a very bad night for John Kerry and for the art of polling.

One of the Bush campaign's leading pollsters was at the conference, too--Jan Van Lohuizen, the president of a group called Voter...