Changes in Polling in Recent Presidential Campaigns
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Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy Discussion Paper Series #R‐33, June 2009 Changes in Media Polling in Recent Presidential Campaigns: Moving from Good to “Average” at CNN By Michael W. Traugott Shorenstein Center Fellow, Spring 2009 Professor of Communication Studies, University of Michigan © 2009 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. This essay was prepared during a fellowship semester in Spring 2009 at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. I am grateful to the Center for financial support and to the University of Michigan for released time to work on this project. The work presented here has benefited from the research assistance of Mary Ellen Smith, for which I am grateful. 1 Introduction Political coverage generally, and campaign coverage in particular, form a central part of the news in the United States. One reason is the important role of elections in our democratic system of governance, a combination of our belief in the representation function of elections and that the outcomes make a difference in which policies are pursued and implemented. Just as importantly, the coverage of elections has many features that appeal to journalists and editors. Elections occur on a fixed schedule, known well in advance; this enables planning for the allocation of resources to the coverage. They involve conflict between the competing campaigns, another highly valued element of newsworthiness. They have events and circumstances that change everyday. They have a relatively orderly progression to a definitive conclusion on Election Day so the coverage is bounded and focused on the outcome; and there is a clear winner and loser at the end, even though in the cases of Bush v. Gore or Coleman versus Franken it may take an unusually long period of time and legal activity in order to determine the actual winner. And the campaigns are populated by relatively willing sources who are happy to be quoted, on or off the record as the situation warrants. So there is a commonly understood narrative that allows news organizations to produce content in a relatively condensed form that is easily understood by their audience members. And the coverage can be produced economically and on schedule, with generally good planning of both the coverage and the allocation of necessary resources. News organizations have a long standing interest in public opinion, dating by some accounts back into the early 19th Century. (Fenton, 1960; Frankovic, 1998; Herbst, 1993 & 1995) Over the years, and certainly since the election of 1948, there have been a series of trends that resulted in very stylized poll‐based coverage of contemporary elections, nowhere more visibly than in presidential elections. While most news can be characterized as event driven, and one of the definitions of what is “news” consists of things (or events) that occurred in the previous 24 hours, the style of campaign coverage has increasingly become focused on the strategy of the candidates and how it is implemented. This includes increased attention to the dynamics of the campaign and the relative standing of the candidates and how it changes as a result of the implementation of their strategy. This is generally encapsulated in the notion of “horserace coverage” that is epitomized by a focus on who is ahead or behind and how that status changes. (Patterson, 1993 & 2005) A new phenomenon that has appeared to help television news operations, as well as some web sites, to refresh their poll‐based coverage with some frequency is the use of a “poll of polls,” an average of other organizations’ recent data rather than new information gathered by the news organization itself. But a poll of polls is not a substitute for a real survey. By definition, it can 2 only be used to describe opinions or attitudes about concepts on which there is a generally accepted common question wording and a common set of response categories. That is why it has been limited to analysis of candidate standings based upon a relatively standardized trial heat question. But the use of an average standing reported almost daily only supports the media’s worst tendencies to employ horse race coverage that focuses on the dynamics and strategy of the campaign. The use of this device amplifies the worst tendencies of news organizations which provide contemporary campaign coverage. The Early History of Media Polling For more than 70 years, polling has maintained a central role in the political coverage produced by major news organizations in the United States, although the historical antecedents for collecting information about public opinion appeared at the beginning of the 19th century. We date the advent of the modern polling era to the election of 1936 when George Gallup struck an arrangement with The Washington Post whereby he guaranteed that he could produce a better estimate of the outcome of that presidential election than The Literary Digest, a magazine that was home to the most visible polling operation of its kind at the time. Gallup bet on his use of more scientific methods, particularly with regard to sampling that would produce better estimates for an electorate embedded in a Depression, because he could improve upon the Digest’s use of mailing lists derived from those who owned telephones and cars as well subscriptions to their magazine. But he also counted on the fact that producing a good estimate with a major media partner would boost the visibility of his new polling firm and produce many new commercial clients from which he could profit. In fact the early history of public opinion polling involved a series of partnerships between the major pollsters and news organizations that would publicize their work through the wide dissemination of their results. The three horsemen who established the new business of media polling in the 1930’s — Archibald Crossley, George Gallup, and Elmo Roper — shared many things in common. 1 First and foremost, they had a background and training in market research, although it varied in terms of formal instruction. And each of them knew that a relationship with a major media organization or outlet was important for the development of the new businesses that each wanted to develop. Crossley actually started his career in the market research division of The Literary Digest, but he eventually developed a polling operation to produce content for the Hearst newspapers in 1936. Roper started a marketing research firm with partners and eventually did consumer surveys for Fortune magazine. 3 Gallup’s background and entry was the most interesting because he began with a specific interest in journalism, parlayed his early work into a position as research director at Young and Rubicam, and then entered the public polling business with a big splash during the 1936 election. He had the most formal education in research methods, completing a Ph.D. in applied psychology at the State University of Iowa with the financial backing of Gardner Cowles, Jr., the newspaper publisher. After taking some early academic positions, he turned to market research at the advertising firm, and he eventually started the Gallup Poll through the American Institute for Public Opinion (AIPO). In going public through his relationship with The Washington Post, he not only offered his money back guarantee but also predicted where The Literary Digest would go wrong and by how much. So from the very beginning, there has been a symbiotic relationship between pollsters and journalists. Polling data contribute in a straightforward and direct way to long standing campaign coverage patterns that news organizations were developing. In return, pollsters receive essentially free advertising for their political and public opinion work that enabled them to attract and maintain commercial clients interested in their marketing research services. The pollsters were interested in relatively permanent relationships with their news clients, and each developed a slightly different form of data collection and dissemination to suit their mutual interests. In the case of the Gallup Organization, they employed a field staff of interviewers all across the nation, and they mailed them packets of questionnaires about once a month. In the early period, the interviewers employed quota sampling techniques within sampled geographical areas and mailed their completed questionnaires back to Princeton, New Jersey for processing. AIPO produced two press releases a week for multiple weeks from each survey, authored by Dr. Gallup as a syndicated newspaper columnist and appearing in more than 200 newspapers by the 1950s. (Gollin, 1987) In this way, each questionnaire could be planned in terms of the press releases that could be generated from it and even in terms of the expected order of the stories that could be produced based upon their timeliness. This model worked very well until a variety of economic and news making forces converged in a way that suggested large news organizations could do as good a job of data collection and analysis on their own and at a lower cost while gaining greater editorial control over the product. A combination of economic and technological trends in the 1970’s moved news organizations from sponsors of polls to conductors of polls. (Crespi, 1980) The changes in technology manifest themselves in the availability of small personal computers (PC’s) that could be linked with telephone lines to conduct the interviews; the fact that 94% of households had a telephone by then obviously contributed to this move. New software meant that the questionnaires could be programmed on the PC’s so that interviewers read the questions off the computer screen and entered a respondent’s answer through the keyboard. When the last 4 question was read and the answer entered, there was a complete data record for that respondent.