Repoll man; one politician's solution to the preelection polls that almost sunk him: one more poll

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1992 by Paul Keisling

Readers of the May 16, 1992, Oregonian couldn't help but draw a conclusion about my bid to win the Democratic nomination for secretary of state, Oregon's second ranking state office: I was toast.

With just three days until the primary, I was 11 points behind my chief rival, the state's four-term labor commissioner, Mary Wendy Roberts. True, I'd made some progress. Six weeks earlier, I'd been 25 points behind, according to an earlier Oregonian poll. But this Il-point gap, so close to the election, was bleak news. I began working on my concession speech.

Three days later I scored an "upset" victory by a convincing seven-point margin. So what happened? What combination of my brilliant strategy and/or my opponent% strategic blunders had tipped the balance? Did all the news-. paper endorsements turn the tide? My record of redistricting the legislature and conducting aggressive performance audits of government programs? Or was it the stirring Aaron Copeland music that accompanied my television commercials?

Danreed if I know. And neither the Oregonian nor anyone else seemed interested in finding out. That's because, beyond the requisite exit polls--whose sole object is to establish the winner as early as possible--polling almost always stops on election day, depriving candidates and voters of answers to a question more important than "who?" Why?

The why of elections could easily be answered with another poll, a day or two after the fact, asking voters what factors influenced theft decisions. This sort of postmortem would shed light on how to fine-tune future preelection polls. Postelection polls might even wean the press and deep-pocket contributors--who often affect races by making more than they should of these surveys--from their current poll addiction. But perhaps their most important function would be served well after the election is over. Postelection polls might give all of us a better sense of what is important to American voters.

Poll cats

The absence of postelection surveys is puzzling, given the increasing prevalence of media-financed polling, and it's not just the CBSs and Newsweeks of the world that devote tens, or hundreds, of thousands of dollars to preelection surveys. Today, a growing number of daily newspapers and local TV stations are rushing into the act. More and more, their polls are going beyond the "top of the ticket" presidential and senatorial races to include state, mayoral, and even city council contests.

Media-sponsored polls have considerable appeal for candidates (we save money) and also a broader logic. When major candidates conduct their own polls, they inevitably try to spin the results to gullible journalists. Thus, there's arguably civic value in surveys that can be characterized as "objective." However, as my race illustrates, there are real dangers in this trend. For one, polls can mislead by testing name 'familiarity rather than true preference. They can also be downright inaccurate if the questions are badly phrased or a sample improperly drawn. For example, a poll that samples from all registered voters--rather than from the much smaller pool of voters likely to cast ballots in a particular election--will often give a much different (and less accurate) picture.

Yet perhaps most damaging aren't the numbers themselves, but how they play out in a campaign-- creating a phenomenon similar to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle known to physicists. Scientists have learned that the mere act of looking at certain subatomic particles in itself disrupts the reality of what's there. (In a nutshell, the light waves necessary for "seeing" the particles change their location.) The political version of this phenomenon occurs when polls, especially inaccurate ones, create their own political reality. A candidate at the short end of an early poll--one who seems to be lacking "big Mo"---can suddenly find fundraising calls unreturned and volunteers vanishing. Candidates don't have the resources to get their message out; reporters write about a "struggling effort"; and so on, in a familiar downward spiral. In effect, the media's quest for news creates news itself. Unfortunately, that news isn't always based on terra fnma.

Inaccurate polls occasionally afflict higher-profile races, too. Two days before the 1990 Senate race in New Jersey, the Newark Star Ledger reported the resuits of a poll that showed Bill Bradley burying Republican challenger Christine Todd Whitman by 17 points. On election night, Bradley escaped with a three-point victory. In the Michigan gubernatorial race that same year, the Detroit Free Press published a poll that forecast a 14-point drubbing for Republican challenger John Englar. Governor Englar, as he is now known, won by. 1 percent of the vote.

Of course, the bigger the candidates, the more they can protect themselves from bad polling. Misleading or inaccurate polls in presidential or U.S. Senate races are produced against a backdrop where issues are more prominent and voters have at least heard candidates' names. Incumbents and hopefuls alike have more options for fighting back and engaging voter attention. But in more obscure races like mine, sexy issues can be hard to come by, and finding money for a mailing or two--much less for constant polling--can be difficult. Getting the public to even notice your race is hard enough. Indeed, beyond a handful of highly visible contests, voter interest in the lower end of the ballot plunges precipitously. It's here that polling can do the most damage.