Politics By BARBARA J. HIPSMAN and BOB SPRINGER

Blacks vote; bad polls

ALMOST as dramatic as the record thin margin in last month's election of governor in Illinois was the record wide margin of error in the pre-election polls conducted for, and interpreted by, news media. This would not be significant were it not for the damnably unshakable belief with which most media wedded themselves to the poll's predictions or the chief reasons pollsters missed the mark. Pollsters missed the heavy turnout, especially in Chicago, and the extent to which Windy City voters would cast straight Democratic ballots. There is no real excuse for this oversight — turnout and potential straight-party voting are two crucial factors in all elections.

The most egregious error, though, was not in the polls themselves, but in the slavish way that media political analysts followed them. Fidelity usually is noble and comforting. But a dog who remains faithful to a clearly cruel master soon becomes a tiring sight. Sympathy for the poor, dumb animal easily sinks to scorn.

On election night, while numbers rolled in showing Democrat Adlai Stevenson giving incumbent Republican Gov. James Thompson the race of Thompson's life, Chicago television newscasters were clownish in their willingness to ignore incoming results. Spines could nearly be heard snapping as analysts bent backwards to promise viewers that the polls would hold up by the time the final ballot was counted. Only the night before, Cook County Democratic boss Edward Vrdolyak had told the Chicago area via the airwaves that the polls were wrong. He said city turnout and straight-party balloting would prove them wrong. He was met by journalistic guffaws.

Worse. Just two days later, newspaper and broadcast accounts of Richard M. Daley's decision to run for mayor presented the results of polls proclaiming young Richie's favor among Chicagoans and Mayor Jane Byrne's outcast position.

An ominous undercurrent of the Chicago vote was the deep discontent among blacks with present Republican national economic atmospheres. Although political leaders shudder at the word depression, most Chicago blacks are convinced the state, nation and world are in the center of one. Thompson so far has ignored that attitude among blacks.

On the Friday after the election, when Thompson declared, "Absolutely, we won" with a margin of 9,900 votes (that within days would evaporate by nearly half), Thompson was asked why his race was so much tighter than the 15- to 20-point spread by which the polls said he would thump Stevenson. He credited the campaign by Vrdolyak to get out the Chicago vote, giving credence to the theory that Vrdolyak was flexing his muscles as a sign to Daley, black U.S. Congressman Harold Washington and any others challenging Mayor Byrne that Vrdolyak's support of the incumbent mayor would be formidable. Thompson didn't say it, but the implication was clear: People who voted for Big Jim did so by choice and after careful evaluation, while Stevenson merely benefited from so many mindless sheep trudging to city polling places and doing what they were told. The implication

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does a tremendous disservice to hundreds of thousands of voters — most of them South Side blacks.

Interviewing cab drivers who shuttled us from Thompson's to Stevenson's headquarters, from hotels to train stations and around town while in Chicago for the election, it became abundantly clear that many city blacks - through willful choice — viewed Thompson and his policies as an extention of the Reagan programs they distrusted. Most of the cabbies were black; all said they voted. They used the saltiest of epithets to describe Thompson, Reagan and Republicans in general. Their resentment of GOP policies runs strong and deep. The statewide candidate in Illinois who does not recognize this has no program for those people.

It is true Vrdolyak's drive to get out the city vote was a harbinger for February's Chicago mayoral primary. But it is also clear Thompson was a victim of an emerging black electorate's powerful venom.

To Thompson's credit, it should be said that it is amazing that he lost as little support as he did since 1978 in suburban Cook County (a net loss of 13 points), the five "collar" counties ringing Cook (7 points) and downstate (5 points). And to Stevenson's shame, the election shows how he should have won easily had he concentrated on the coalitions that enabled his party's congressional and state legislative candidates to emerge with victory. The significant fact from the gubernatorial election remains, however, that the man being inaugurated next month serves with less than a majority approval. (United Taxpayer candidate John Roche and Libertarian candidate Bea Armstrong garnered about 1 percent of the vote.) And the Democratic-controlled General Assembly features a House and Senate in which Chicago has unparalleled power; and the city derives its strength from an electorate of which nearly half are blacks who did what the white power structure has been lecturing them to do for generations — vote. Those are tight limitations on any governor's ability to initiate and execute programs.

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