-Caveat Lector-
JOHN FUND'S POLITICAL DIARY
Ignore the Polls
The campaign isn't over yet.
Wednesday, September 20, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT
The political obituaries are rolling in. William Saletan of
Slate.com: "Bush is toast." Lawrence O'Donnell of "The McLaughlin
Group": "It's over." Eric Alterman of MSNBC.com: "Barring
extraterrestrial intervention, the election's over and Gore won
it." Why? Pundits are citing polls like the one just out from
Newsweek that shows Al Gore leading George W. Bush by 14 points
among likely voters.
All this makes you wonder why we still have campaigns to capture
the attention of inattentive voters and change their minds. The
polls vary in their methodology, and too often the poll-obsessed
nature of campaign coverage freezes public perceptions of the
candidates and contributes to the low voter turnout everyone in
the media claims to be against.
The Newsweek poll turns out to be of only 580 likely voters over
two nights. One of them was a Friday, when pollsters say more
Democrats are at home. In 1996, Newsweek's late-October survey
had Bob Dole losing to Bill Clinton by a whopping 23 points. Mr.
Dole lost by eight. (Newsweek's pollster says it did a final but
unpublished survey that showed an 11-point margin.)
Other polls with a better track record show different results.
The bipartisan Hotline poll shows the race tied. The Battleground
poll, a joint project of Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and GOP
pollster Ed Goeas, got the 1996 Clinton victory margin right
within 0.5% of the vote. As of this Tuesday, their nightly
tracking poll has Mr. Bush leading Mr. Gore by four points.
Similarly, the Rasmussen Research nightly tracking poll now shows
Mr. Bush with a 44% to 41% lead among likely voters. Mr.
Rasmussen uses a telephone prompting system rather than live
interviewers to survey respondents, a controversial technique.
But an analysis by the Progressive Review found that his
polls--along with those of Gallup and Zogby--proved to be the
most accurate during this year's primaries, and his lower costs
allow him to survey more people and reduce his margin of error to
2%.
The third nightly tracking poll is Gallup, which has a good
record even if its final 1996 survey overstated Mr. Clinton's
winning margin by three percentage points. It currently shows Mr.
Gore holding a four-point lead over Gov. Bush. Averaged together,
the three nightly tracking polls show a one-point Bush lead.
In recent years, election polls have often overestimated the
Democrats' share of the vote. People like to tell pollsters they
plan to fulfill their civic duty and vote. In reality, about
one-third of people who say that won't show up. The best polls
figure out if people are engaged enough to be likely voters. Even
with those efforts, polls often oversample groups such as
blue-collar women that end up not voting in high numbers.
Turnout, which in 1996 fell below half of all adults, does
matter. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll has Mr. Gore
leading among registered voters by 45% to 42%, but Mr. Bush
leading by 45% to 43% among likely voters.
There are other reasons polls may tilt slightly toward Democrats.
Warren Mitofsky, who developed exit polling for CBS News in the
1960s, believes Democrats are more likely to respond to media
polls than are Republicans, who may distrust the "liberal" news
media. More than 60% of those pollsters try to contact routinely
hide behind answering machines or otherwise refuse to answer.
"This makes survey results more uncertain, and should cause
concern, caution and above all humility in reporting the
results," says Leo Bogart, a former president of the American
Association for Public Opinion Research.
That humility was not found among the media in 1996, when almost
every major poll overstated President Clinton's victory margin.
Purdue University professor Gerald S. Wasserman says his
mathematical analysis of the 1996 polls showed them to be "a
collective failure," all erring in Mr. Clinton's favor. He found
that only once in 4,900 elections would chance alone produce
that. "To continue to use current polling technology without
calling for a change would be like having a gambler play after
the roulette wheel comes up red 12 times in a row," he says. "In
both cases, it might just be chance, but any sensible person
would stop and check the apparatus before going on."
Unfortunately, polls help dictate media coverage. Reporters
overemphasize certain elements of a candidate's personality--Mr.
Gore's penchant for exaggeration or Mr. Bush's verbal flubs--if
the polls turn against one or the other. Then until the polls
turn again, coverage conforms to the stereotype. ABC's George
Stephanopoulos, a key strategist in Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign,
said last week that political scientists "talk about the
bandwagon effect, that once a candidate gets in the zone, all of
the coverage is good, almost no matter what happens, and when
you're out of the zone, even when do you do things right, it goes
against you."
The polls are a prime mover in this bandwagon effect. But before
they drive a candidate's supporters to despair or allow the media
to beat a stereotype to death, some basic consumer reporting
would help. Reporters should tell us which polls have a good
track record, which have been clunkers, how much pollsters "push"
the undecided to a candidate, and how much less reliable some
individual state surveys are. To do anything less risks
heightening the cynicism of an electorate that increasingly feels
it's being manipulated by both parties and not told the whole
story by the media.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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