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1 of 13 October 24, 2004 | home THE POLLSTER by LARISSA MACFARQUHAR Does John Zogby know who will win the election? Issue of 2004-10-18 Posted 2004-10-11 Shortly after his fifty-sixth birthday, several weeks ago, John Zogby, the pollster, could be found at seven-thirty in the evening walking rapidly back and forth among the brightly lit shops in the Copley Place Mall, in Boston, trying vainly to locate the skybridge to the Prudential Center. He had been told to “walk through retail,” but, amid the confusing display of stores leading in every direction, he was finding this instruction insufficiently specific. He was dressed up in a tie and jacket, and he walked with his shoulders hunched over and pointed forward, as though he were trying to prevent a cloak from falling off. He seemed, as he usually does, mild, overcaffeinated, inquisitive, watchful, cautiously friendly, somewhat anxious, yet fundamentally optimistic. He had been hired to address the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, one of his polling clients, and worried that he was late, but when he arrived the road builders were still in the middle of a preprandial auction (a bird hunt, a golf getaway), and so, after securing himself a plastic glass of wine and a plateful of cheese cubes, Zogby retreated to a distant table to await the commencement of dinner. “I can’t help but remember the early years,” he told the road builders when it was time for him to speak. “One Friday, I was at a happy hour and ran into an old chum from high school. I told him I was a pollster, spread the word. Lo and behold, first thing Monday I got a call from his aunt, and she said, ‘You’re a pollster?’ and I said yes, and she said, ‘Well, I have a sofa and a chair.’ “Welcome to the Armageddon election,” Zogby said when the laughter had died down. “We have divided ourselves into two equal warring nations. We did a poll last December on this fiction we’ve created, red states and blue states. It’s a pure fiction, because Florida’s a red state by a few hundred votes, and New Mexico—a couple of hundred votes made it blue. But listen to what we found. Fifty-four per cent of red-state voters said they attend a place of worship at least once a 2 of 13 week—that’s a very important conservative voting indicator—thirty-two per cent of blue-state voters said they did. Seventy-five per cent of the reds said they want a President who believes in God, fifty-one per cent of the blues. Fifty-six per cent of red-state voters said they keep a gun, thirty-five per cent of blue-state voters said so. In a blue state, you are seven points more likely to be single, never married, and, let me tell you, we talk about a gender gap in politics, but it’s minuscule compared to the married-single gap.” In fact, Zogby has since discovered in a poll of women that the gender gap in this election has disappeared altogether. (He also discovered that women pick Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” over Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” by a nearly two-to-one margin as a movie they’d like all Americans to see.) “On most issues married and single voters can be twenty-five or thirty points different, married ones being more conservative,” he continued. “So that’s the context in which we have this election.” John Zogby has been polling for two decades now, but he made his national reputation eight years ago, after the Clinton-Dole race of 1996. Most pollsters predicted a double-digit victory for Clinton, while Zogby predicted a narrow margin of eight per cent—the actual figure was 8.5 per cent. Zogby’s uncanny accuracy, combined with the dramatic failure of the other polls, won him a lot of attention. In 2000, he repeated his performance, being one of only two major pollsters to predict that Gore would win the popular vote. He has had his share of humiliations, too, of course. When Hillary Clinton was deciding whether to run for the Senate in New York, he wrote an Op-Ed piece for the Times explaining why she wouldn’t win; his final poll predicted a tie, when she actually won by twelve points. Nonetheless, this year he is conducting national election polls for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, and smaller polls for the Miami Herald and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Nor is his ambition confined to the United States: he has polled in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and South America. His group was one of the first to publish survey results from Iraq. Zogby wants to be the Gallup of his generation—the brand name in polling all over the world. Lately, in fact, he has derived some satisfaction from observing the wild vacillations of the Gallup election polls—Bush thirteen points ahead in mid-September, eight points ahead at the end of the month, dead even with Kerry on October 4th—because he finds it implausible that such enormous swings reflect actual changes in public opinion. “I mean, good debate, but it wasn’t that good,” he says. He concludes that Gallup’s polls are less reliable than his own. “Zogby is more volatile, but Zogby polls are less volatile,” he says. It’s all a matter of technique. “How do I get a handle on this election or any other?” he asked the road builders. “I asked one question the Saturday before the election in 2000. I called my call center in Utica and said, ‘Put this in the poll: “You live in the land of Oz, and the candidates are the Tin Man, who’s all brains and no heart, and the Scarecrow, who’s 3 of 13 all heart and no brains. Who would you vote for?”’ The next day, I called Utica and said, ‘Whaddaya got?’ They said, ‘Well we’ve got Gore—,’ I said, ‘I don’t care about Gore. What’s Oz?’ It was 46.2 for the Tin Man and 46.2 for the Scarecrow. It was right there that I knew I wasn’t going to know what was going to happen. But I asked this question again two weeks ago and the Tin Man led by ten points.” Utica, New York, where Zogby grew up and now has his headquarters, is a small, depressed, formerly industrial city about fifty miles east of Syracuse. Zogby’s office is situated in a particularly desolate part of town, full of vacant lots, boarded-up buildings, and closed-down pizza parlors. The office is on the third floor of a giant old factory building, on a road of what used to be textile mills. It shares the place with several small businesses—the Trim-A-Lawn Corporation, Variable Speed Motor, U.S.A. Sewing. The building’s ancient elevator still has a sign in it instructing its patrons how to push the buttons by themselves, along with a newer, paper sign warning that employees caught writing on its walls will be immediately dismissed. Most of Zogby’s office space is taken up by the call center where the polling is done—a large, low-ceilinged room divided into rows of cubicles, each of which is equipped with a phone and a computer. There are no personal items in the cubicles, because they are occupied by several shifts of callers, which start at nine in the morning and continue until it is evening on the West Coast. The day shift at the call center consists mostly of elderly women (the oldest is eighty-six), who dress in casual pants and tops and drape cardigans over the backs of their chairs for protection against the air-conditioning. Most seem to like their work, chatting with their respondents in a grandmotherly way and commenting on their answers. Zogby’s own office has the look of a rec room from the seventies, with wood panelling and wall-to-wall blue carpet. Above his desk he has hung a large photograph of the New York City skyline at night; nearby hang his college diploma and charts detailing “Leadership Succession in the Middle East since 1945” and “Middle East Selected Socioeconomic Indicators.” Over the years, Zogby has often asked himself why he stayed in Utica. Sometimes he says it’s because living there keeps him in tune with what real Americans are thinking. “If folks aren’t talking about it when I pick up the paper, it’s not a real issue,” he says, citing as an example the Gary Condit scandal, which nobody in town cared about. But he will also say that he is there because life gave him lemons and he made lemonade: his wife is from Utica, too, and didn’t want to leave her family, and it was a good town to raise kids in. (They have three sons.) Whatever the reason, living in this far-from-Washington place has reinforced his sense that he is an outsider in the 4 of 13 polling business. Zogby thinks of himself as a natural maverick who stands outside the clubby world of the other pollsters because he finds it pompous and stuffy and because he isn’t a joiner anyway. But it is also true that he uses techniques that are frowned upon by AAPOR, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, as unscientific or unethical.

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