RALEIGH – Democrats and Republicans, beware of irrational exuberance.

No, I’m not talking about the stock market. That was the term that Fed Chief Alan Greenspan used back in the mid-1990s to describe the bull market on Wall Street (and he wasn’t right about that, as the irrational part of the market’s rise didn’t happen until late in the decade, during an inflationary spurt that he and other Y2K-niacs engineered).

I’m talking about the polls. Within North Carolina, Democrats are trumpeting a new flash poll for WTVD-TV in Durham and WBTV-TV in Charlotte that showed Gov. Mike Easley ahead of Republican Patrick Ballantine by 15 points. The same Sept. 6-8 poll showed Erskine Bowles retaining a 10-point lead over Richard Burr and put President George W. Bush in front of John Kerry in the state by only four.

Meanwhile, at the national level a favorable trend towards Bush has Republicans patting themselves so furiously on the back that I’d invest in a chiropractic tracking stock, if there was one. Not only are the nationwide match-ups continuing to give Bush a clear edge, but some new polling – again, TV flash polls – even have the president leading Kerry in New Jersey and coming close in the bluer-than-blue state of Illinois.

Everybody, just calm down. It’s way too early to get giddy.

We ought to know by now how different Election Day results can be from late-summer polls. Michael Dukakis led Bush ’41 in late-summer 1988. There was actually a Bill Clinton-Bob Dole contest in late-summer 1996. That same year, media polls just weeks before the vote had Gov. Jim Hunt leading Republican challenger Robin Hayes by margins as absurdly large as 26 points. While Hunt won easily, the margin in November was half that, 13 points.

This year, polls have also gyrated. The same Survey USA organization that put out the September poll favorable to Easley had a much-scarier poll for him a few weeks ago – with Ballantine trailing by only seven points. The day before the July 20 GOP primary for governor, it had Richard Vinroot at 32 percent, Bill Cobey at 25 percent, and Ballantine at 24 percent. I don’t mean to pick on the Survey USA flash poll. Plenty of other survey findings have proven to be untrustworthy predictors of the future this year; it may be a cliche to say so, but polls really are snapshots in time.

There’s something to be said for going with your gut. I think that the Bowles-Burr and Ballantine-Easley races will tighten considerably, just as a double-digit Easley lead over Vinroot in pre-election polls in 2000 shrank to a 5.5-point win. North Carolina is probably not going to be electing folks in statewide landslides for a while, so get used to relatively close contests. I also have a feeling that the NC Senate bears watching. Democrats probably start out with 24 fairly safe seats vs. 23 fairly safe Republican ones, leaving three seats to decide control. I think that with a good Bush tailwind, Republicans could win at least two of those, possibly all three. Just two would make it 25-25, a scenario that puts Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue front-and-center and creates the possibility of a coalition that could surprise the political establishment.

At the national level, I don’t think anything is a given, either. Let’s just watch and listen, study and debate, pray and fume – and then vote. No point trying to call things in the seventh inning.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.