ABC News/Washington Post Poll

ABC News and The Washington Post initiated their polling partnership on February 19, 1981, announcing an 18—month agreement to jointly produce news surveys on current issues and trends. More than 25 years, 475 surveys, and 500,000 individual interviews later, the partnership has proved an enduring one. Their first shared survey—known as the ABC/Post poll to viewers of ABC News, and the Post/ABC survey to readers of the Post—focused on newly elected President Ronald Reagan's tax- and budget-cutting plans. While their work over the years has covered attitudes on a broad range of social issues, ABC and the Post have focused their joint polling primarily on politics and elections.

The two organizations consult to develop survey subjects, oversee methodology and research, and write questionnaires; each independently analyzes and reports the resulting data. Sampling, field work, and tabulation for nearly all ABC/Post polls have been managed from the start by the former Chilton Research Services, subsequently acquired by the multinational research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres.

In addition to full-length, multi-night surveys, ABC and the Post have shared other polls designed to meet news demands, including one-night surveys (e.g. immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001); daily preelection tracking polls, in which the Post joined ABC as of 2000; and a weekly consumer confidence survey, in which the Post in 2005 joined an ABC effort ongoing since 1985.

The Post has been polling on its own since 1975, ABC since 1979. Their partnership was created by Dick Wald, senior vice president of ABC News, and his friend Ben Bradlee, the Post's editor. Wald pitched the idea at lunch. Bradlee said, “Okay. You have a deal,” he recalled. “We just shook hands. There was no contract, no paper, no anything else.”

Jeffrey Alderman was longtime director of the survey for ABC, replaced in 1998 by Gary Langer. Barry Sussman directed for the Post, replaced in 1987 by Richard Morin, who in turn was succeeded in 2006 by Jonathan Cohen, then ABC's assistant polling director.

The news organizations also conduct polls on their own and with other partners. In 2005, ABC won the first news Emmy Award to cite a public opinion poll, for its second national survey in Iraq, on which it partnered with the BBC, the German network ARD, and USA Today. ABC also won the 2006 Iowa/Gallup award and 2006 National Council on Public Polls award for its polling in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Post won the 2007 Iowa/Gallup award for its survey focusing on black men in America, a poll it conducted with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.

Their joint polling nonetheless has been the most consistent feature of both organizations' efforts to [Page 2]cover the beat of public opinion. A search of the Factiva news archive for the 20 years through mid-2007 found 11,266 media references to ABC/Post polls, far surpassing references to any of the other ongoing news-sponsored public opinion surveys.