Polling

ON JULY 26, 1824, the United States entered the world of pre-election polling when the Harrisburg Pennsylva-nian conducted a straw poll in two Delaware cities to determine voter preference in the upcoming presidential election. Presidential straw polls began to proliferate in 1896, as other newspapers and journals attempted to get a lead on the competition by publishing interesting copy that included forecasting the future. The science and art of political polling came into its own in the 1930s and 1940s with the work of George Gallup, Elmo Roper, Archibald Crossley, and Mervin Field. These were the first and most significant efforts to collect national and state random samples, not the crude efforts at straw polling that had been predominant.

A typical poll, conducted face-to-face in sampling points all across the United States, normally took weeks to complete. Pollsters had to hire and train field workers, develop samples with maps and pins, and mail questionnaires and completed interviews. There were no personal computers, and no telephone calls because too many areas and households did not have access to telephony. Results were hardly as timely as today's overnight findings that allow for rapid-fire discussions and talking-head punditry on a just-in-time basis.

Since the 1960s, the number of practitioners has grown exponentially and has followed two separate tracks: the partisan pollsters and the public polls. The partisan pollsters conduct most of their work in private trying to probe the depths of public tastes, values, character, and behavior, all in an attempt to see what drives voter decisions, what can move people, and how candidates can best communicate their story to voters. Some of the best work done is Democrats Peter Hart, Mark Mellman, Doug Schoen, and Marc Penn, along with Republicans such as Richard Wirthlin, Robert Teeter, Frank Luntz, and Neil Newhouse.

Success in molding and shaping political campaigns allows these polling gurus to find enormous success as strategic and communications consultants in the corporate world. The private poll allows the campaign team to develop a blueprint that can define the candidate's image, the strategic blueprint, the overall message, what to emphasize and what to play down, even what clothes to wear, how best to market the candidate's spouse, even what family matters will be a problem. Early benchmark polls can feature as many as 120 questions.

The private pollster can be a philosopher-king if correct. In 1996, Pat Caddell, who launched his career in 1972 when he offered to do polling for George McGov-ern very cheaply, moved into this higher status when he outlined, through very good post-Watergate polling, the image of the “Georgia peanut farmer who will never tell a lie” for Jimmy Carter in 1975 and 1976. However, Caddell seemed to lose much of his magic when he advised Carter to fire his cabinet and deliver the president's famously disastrous “American malaise” speech in the late 1970s.

Public pollsters use the same skills, but their focus is on sharing their results with media. The major national news media began this process in the 1960s to ensure that candidates were not able to misrepresent, or even create fictional polling results to the general public and possible contributors. Despite occasional complaints about “poll-ution,” the constant reporting of many public polls in the news media, Americans want to feel connected to their world and to know where they stand in relative to other citizens. Without public polling, candidates could easily manipulate private findings to show they are doing better than they really are. Thus, the major national news networks and daily newspapers all sponsor political polls, both to determine the public's views on issues, as well as their preferences in upcoming major presidential horse races. Too often, these polls, especially when conducted early in a presidential cycle, are misunderstood as predictive tools when, in reality, they are merely occasional barometric readings to see where the public stands at the moment.

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