PUBLIC-OPINION POLLING   
By F. Christopher Arterton

From the viewpoint of those running for public office, election campaigns are mostly composed of an extensive effort to communicate with divergent audiences. Candidates must get their message across to party officials, party members, potential contributors, supporters, volunteers, journalists, and, of course, voters. Ultimately, all campaign activities are secondary to a candidate’s efforts to communicate with voters. Accordingly, it is not surprising to learn that the largest share of campaign resources are poured into this two-way communication: advertising to send persuasive messages to voters, and polling to learn the concerns that voters have and the opinions they hold.

Over the past three decades, polling has become a principal research tool for developing campaign strategy in American elections. The major elements of that strategy consist of the answers to two simple questions: (1) what are the target audiences that a campaign must reach? (2) what messages does it need to deliver to these audiences? Polling is essential for answering both of these questions.

SURVEYING VOTERS’ ATTITUDES

By and large, the technique most frequently employed for these purposes is the cross-sectional, random-sample survey in which the campaign’s polling firm telephones a random sample of citizens and asks them an inventory of standard questions. Sampling theory dictates that if the citizens are selected at random and are sufficiently numerous, their answers to these questions will deviate only slightly from the answers that would have been given if every eligible voter had been asked. Completing such a survey before new, major events change the attitudes of voters can also be very important, so most polls are conducted over a three- or four-day period. That means that a large number of interviewers — either paid or volunteer — have to be used to reach several hundred voters each evening, between the hours of 5:00 and 10:00 P.M. They ask the same questions in the same way to all potential voters.

Surprisingly, most campaign pollsters do not base their sample upon the population of all citizens of voting age. As is widely known, in the United States substantial numbers of eligible voters do not actually cast their ballots on election day. Campaigns have learned through much hard experience that it is more efficient to concentrate their efforts on likely voters. Accordingly, the first few questions on most survey instruments try to ascertain how likely it is that the citizen being questioned will actually vote. The interviewer will thank the unlikely voters and move on to other calls. As a result, campaign communications strategy is built around the interests of likely voters, and campaigns rarely make major efforts to attract votes among hard-core nonvoters.

After identifying likely voters, the first task of the survey is to divide them into three groups: confirmed supporters of the candidate in question, confirmed supporters of the opponent and the “undecideds.” Then, the basic principle of American election campaigns can be reduced to three simple rules: (1) reinforce your base of support, (2) ignore the opponent’s base and (3) concentrate most attention upon the undecideds. That is, in the United States most of the energy of election campaigns is directed at the approximately 20 to 30 percent of the voters who may potentially change their votes from Democratic to Republican or vice versa.

Though most candidates are desperately interested in who is more popular with voters, the usefulness of the cross-sectional survey goes far beyond simply measuring the closeness of the election contest. Campaigns need an accurate measurement of voter opinions, but they also need to know how to change (or preserve) these opinions. The term “cross-sectional” refers to the differences among groups of citizens; the survey technique is designed to record opinion among the various subsections that differentiate the pool of voters. If there are gender differences in the way voters look at the election, for example, the survey will be able to measure these distinctive attitudes. The campaign that discovers itself doing better with male voters, among all those who have already decided how they will vote, will begin to concentrate its efforts upon men who are still undecided, because those voters are likely to be easier to win over.

DETERMINING APPROPRIATE MESSAGES

By asking many questions about voters’ preferences for different public policies, the political poll also provides candidates with insights about the messages they need to deliver to critical groups of voters. Late in an election race, for example, undecided voters may be those who are more cynical about election politics. This result may tempt the candidate to attack his opponent for a poor attendance record or some action that can be pictured as favoring a particular interest group over the general public. In the case of gender differences, a campaign that is doing poorly among females may discover some special concerns held by women through polling and attempt to devise a message specifically for them.

Normally, the process of creating the messages that will move critical groups relies on statistical methods; the answers of supporters, opponents, and the undecideds are analyzed to determine the strength of the association between candidate support and public-policy attitudes. A strong association is a good indication that the policy area in question may be “driving” the choice of candidates. Other questions will give the campaign an idea of how to deliver the appropriate message to the target group. Voters are asked about their radio-listening habits, the organizations they belong to, the television programs they watch and the newspapers they normally read.

CONSTRUCTING THE SURVEY

Polling is both science and art. Constructing a random sample, designing the questionnaire, fielding the survey instrument and analyzing the results constitute the science of public-opinion research. All these aspects rely upon well-established, validated techniques. The art comes in writing the questions. Question wording can markedly affect the results obtained. Consider, for example, two different questions: “Do you support sending U.S. troops to Kosovo to enforce the recent peace accord?” versus “Do you support President Clinton’s plan to send U.S. troops to Kosovo to enforce the recent peace accord?” Voters are likely to react differently to these questions; some opinions will be altered either in favor of or against the proposal simply by the association with the president. Which of these wordings is more appropriate depends upon the judgment of the pollster and the purposes of the survey.

In general, when polls are to be used to develop strategy, the consultants labor to write questions that are fair and impartial so they can achieve an accurate measurement of public opinion. Lately, however, campaigns have been resorting to so-called push questions to test possible campaign themes. In these questions, voters are asked to react to questions that have been deliberately worded in very strong language. Consider the following example: “If you knew that one of these candidates had voted to cut welfare payments to the poor, would that increase or decrease the chances that you would vote for that candidate?” When the poll data reveal that many undecided voters back away from a candidate when confronted with this information, then the candidate sponsoring the poll is likely to use this approach in attacking his or her opponent.

At times this technique has been carried too far, and some unscrupulous campaigns have conducted surveys with the sole intention of planting negative information about their opponent. Though it is difficult to prove a campaign’s real intent, the American Association of Political Consultants has recently condemned “push polling” as unethical. Nevertheless, within appropriate bounds, a few push questions normally are used in most campaign polls to test possible messages.

Increasingly, political pollsters combine focus-group research with random-sample surveys in order to develop campaign messages. In the typical focus group, voters are telephoned at random and asked to participate in a collective discussion on a given evening. In these group sessions involving between eight and 15 voters, pollsters are able to gather a qualitative, in-depth view of citizen thinking. Often focus-group discussions will provide a more detailed interpretation of the survey results. Knowing how voters reach their conclusions can be just as important as the quantitative distribution of opinion gathered by surveys. Focus groups can also provide pollsters with question wording that captures the thought processes of citizens, so that the influential messages they work into campaign advertising will have maximum impact.

TRACKING THE CAMPAIGN

Behind the scenes, most major political campaigns rely on polling from the beginning to the end of the election race. The typical candidacy will be formulated on the basis of a “benchmark” poll taken about eight months before the election. This expensive survey may take as much as 30 minutes to complete over the phone and will include a large enough sample (usually around 1,000 to 1,500) so that inferences can be drawn about important subgroups of voters. Once the campaign has begun and voters are being bombarded with competing campaign messages, the pollster returns to the field, often several times, using much shorter questionnaires in order to get an idea of how the opinions have changed from the original benchmark.

A number of well-funded campaigns — usually those for president or for senator or governor in larger states — recently have begun using “tracking surveys” to follow the impact of campaign events. The pollster completes, say, 400 interviews on each of three nights. The resulting 1,200 voters constitute an adequate sample with an error rate of about 3 percent. On the fourth night, the pollster calls another 400 voters and adds that to the database, dropping off the answers of those voters reached on the first night. And this process continues, sometimes for six months of campaigning, so that the sample rolls along at a constant 1,200 drawn from the previous three nights. Over time, the resulting database will allow the pollster to observe the effect of campaign events — such as televised debates, a major news story or the start of a new advertising theme — upon voter attitudes and preferences. If, for example, the lines indicating support for two candidates are roughly parallel until the point at which the opponent started attacking on the basis of character rather than policies, and after that point the two lines start to diverge as the opponent’s support increases, then the pollster had better figure out a way of countering the character message being used by the opponent or the race will be lost.

Figuring out how to counter the opponent’s attack may involve examining particular subgroups in the electorate, or it may call for a new message from the injured campaign, but in either case, the response will be based on survey research. Polling, American politicians would agree, has become an essential ingredient of campaign strategy.