[From today's NY Times Week in Review.]
A Modest Poll Proposal
By Alison Mitchell
Washington -- And now for a modest proposal: Ban all political polling between now and Election Day.
The first presidential debate last week demonstrated at numbing length the extent to which polling is consuming both politics and journalism. Like human semaphores, Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore kept signaling each and every poll- determined swing group that they were on their side.
There were dueling prescription drug plans for the elderly and education plans to woo the suburban soccer moms. Mr. Gore's denunciations of "tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent" of Americans were aimed at the lower middle class, while Mr. Bush's rejected "old-style Washington politics" in a bid for independents.
Next came the post-debate blizzard of media polls. MSNBC, with the help of the Republican pollster Frank Luntz, had 36 avowedly undecided voters in the swing state of Missouri using dials to record their reaction to every word of the debate. Fox News and SpeakOut.com were running a "Rate the Debate" forum via the Internet. CBS's online poll proclaimed Mr. Gore the winner by 56 to 42 percent. NBC's overnight poll gave it to Mr. Gore 46 percent to 36 percent. And ABC's snap poll said that Mr. Gore had won 42 percent to 39 percent. (In a bracing moment of on-air rebellion the ABC anchor Peter Jennings announced and then brazenly dismissed his own network's instant telephone poll as unscientific and meaningless).
So addicted has the political class become to polls that politicians shudder at the very idea of a survey-free October. Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, who was working the crowded press room in Boston before last Tuesday's debate, laughed aloud at the idea and said, "I don't think you could ever enforce it."
Bill Curry, a former aide to President Clinton, who has also run for office in Connecticut, said, "I'm just bothered by the image of the candidates actually reading actual entrails and how hard it would be on small farm animals."
But what if polls really were banned? "We'd be spared huge amounts of false explanations for why the candidates are going up and down," Mr. Kristol said. And Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, suggested the nation's political journalism might improve. "Journalists have abdicated the responsibility of listening to voters in favor of listening to polls as the primary diviner of meaning in political coverage," Mr. Rosenstiel said. "We use polls as a crutch and it's weakening other skills we have."
For years now, polls and focus groups have been creating an echo-chamber effect in politics where candidates all address the same issues and speak with the same poll-tested words until every candidate seems indistinguishable. President Clinton even had the audacity in 1996 to take a standard poll question — is the country on the right track? — and turn it into a campaign theme, perhaps in a circular effort to influence the answer to the polling question. "We're on the right track and we're not going back," he cheerily thundered on his whistlestop train tour to the Democratic convention.
The emphasis on polling is now so pervasive within political campaigns that that they may be actively deterring original ideas. "It's always a danger in a democracy that politicians become flatterers instead of leaders," said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, who was former Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff. "Pollsters don't understand that you can move public opinion. For candidates spending too much on polls it's like driving looking in the rearview mirror. You don't see what you can change."
Mr. Bush likes to proclaim he "won't be swayed by polls and focus groups." But then he turned around and started talking about an "education recession," a phrase Republicans proudly said was carefully poll- tested. He is no worse an offender than Mr. Gore.
News organizations have been equally seduced. These days are not just running polls, they are now running daily tracking polls measuring every tiny mood swing of the electorate. And the race is being reported on through the prism of the polls.
All spring when Mr. Bush was ahead in the surveys, his campaign was being called masterful, his victory inevitable, his strategists confident and in command. By August, Senator Phil Gramm, a fellow Texas Republican, announced, "I'm expecting our governor to win by maybe double digits."
Mr. Gore was seen as wooden and, horror of horrors, as poll driven. Many thought he was fading from the race. Yet come September, as the polls shifted, Mr. Bush became the hapless one, his malapropisms fatal and his aides reactive, while Mr. Gore had metamorphosed into a bold risk taker gleaming with a winner's confidence. "I've called it for Gore," Lawrence O'Donnell Jr., a contributing editor for New York Magazine, said on the "Hardball" television show. "I think he's unstoppable at this point."
Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, said that journalists this year were scouring polls to find backup for the narratives they wanted to write rather than using them to learn about the nuances of public opinion. "There are so many polls now that if you look around you can find something that underscores what herd journalism thinks is happening," Mr. Kohut said.
He noted that an astute student of polls in the spring, instead of ordaining Mr. Bush, would have recognized that public opinion was not fixed. "You would have seen how much volatility there was," Mr. Kohut said, "that you can't trust this Bush lead."
Michael R. Kagay, who directs the News Survey Department of The New York Times, said that The Times has a policy of minimizing the horse-race aspect of its polls in its coverage, and focusing on what polls show about the attitudes of the electorate. He said that as a general rule The Times does not put the horse-race matchup in either the first paragraph of a story or in the headline.
If there is one bright spot this year, it may be that the voters themselves almost seem like they want to confound everyone. Just when Mr. Gore looked like he was out of the race, the public swung his way. When Mr. Bush appeared in danger of permanently falling behind, he caught up. "People are contrarian in a certain way," Mr. Kristol said, celebrating the twists and turns of this year's race. "They keep wanting to do the opposite of what the polls tell them they want to do. The voters are less susceptible to herd mentality than the pundits."
[end]
Carl
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