From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to the Free Expression podcast from the Wall Street Journal. I'm Jerry Baker, editor at large of the journal.

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This week, it's almost over, or is it? As the seemingly interminable campaign

reaches its final few days, we're going to take us our inspiration this week, the line once used

by a famously windy senator at the end of a long debate in that august chamber. Everything that

can possibly be said has already been said, he declared. The problem is, not everyone has said it yet.

Well, we're less than a week now from Voting Day, and still the storm of another close election

has not broken.

Two candidates remain deadlocked in the national polling, and also, it seems, in the states

that will decide the outcome in the electoral college.

A barring some last-minute surge for either candidate or the possibility that the opinion

polls have been dramatically wrong all along, we are staring once again at the unsettling

probability that we won't know who's won the presidency, or maybe control of Congress,

for days or maybe even weeks.

But let's leave the post-election turmoil, at least until the post-election

period, and instead take one final look this week at the state of the race. And in particular,

ask whether, in fact, the outcome might be less in doubt than perhaps people think. Well, to talk

about this and how the campaign's gone and what we can expect in the final few days, I'm joined

this week by veteran pollster Doug Schoen. Shone has been in the polling business for almost 50 years, having co-founded his consulting firm of Penn, Shone and Berlin in the 1970s. He's worked for innumerable candidates and campaigns, including those of Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well, of course, as Republicans and Independence. He's a prolific commentator and a regular contributor to multiple publications, including, I'm glad to say, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. And Doug Shone joins me now. Doug, thanks very much for joining free expression. Happy to be here, Jerry. Okay, well, I'm not going to ask you the obvious question, which is who's going to win the election, but we've been fixated on the polls now for such a long time and it's actually been apparently

very little movement. This race still seems to be more or less deadlocked. We start with a

slightly unusual question. Polls have been wrong, quite a bit wrong in the last few elections.

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