FAIR: The media should avoid early election polls

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Who's Counting?
The media should avoid early election polls

4/26/07

While it certainly feels like the presidential election cycle has started earlier than ever, a more important issue is what sort of coverage of the process the media are providing citizens. Much of what voters are seeing is reporting and analysis of early polls, which show Rudolph Giuliani with a wide lead over his Republican counterparts, and senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama leading the Democratic field.

But if history is any guide, the polls are a complete waste of time. If the media consider them useful for their predictive value, consider the record: In 2003, early polling of the following year's Democratic nominees (e.g., CBS News poll, 12/14-12/16/03) showed eventual nominee John Kerry in the middle of the pack, trailing Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Richard Gephardt and Joe Lieberman. An August 2003 USA Today/Gallup Poll (8/25-8/26/03) showed front-runner Lieberman with a 10-point lead over Gephardt. As the dynamics of the nomination race shifted, so did the polls—but not in a way that would suggest the polling would predict the winner. By January 2004, Howard Dean was leading the pack, followed closely by Wesley Clark (1/2-5/04).

The Democratic race was similarly competitive in 1992, and the polls then were similarly useless in helping to predict the eventual nominee. In March 1991, Paul Tsongas, Mario Cuomo and Dick Gephardt were the frontrunners according to one survey of New Hampshire voters (Boston Globe, 3/31/91). Bill Clinton was hardly a factor.

And four years earlier, the Democratic race proved equally hard to gauge by looking at the polls. Former Sen. Gary Hart led in one early ABC/Washington Post poll (5/8/87), though a Post article (8/24/87) noted that Michael Dukakis seemed to be treated as the front-runner at a candidates' debate even though "he barely makes it out of single digits in national polls." By December 1987, Hart was polling at 30 percent, Jesse Jackson at 20 percent support and eventual nominee Michael Dukakis in third place with 15 percent (Washington Post, 12/19/87).

The Republican nominating process has tended to be less competitive in recent years, so an exact comparison is difficult. But in the 2000 race, Bush's only serious competition came from Sen. John McCain, who was trailing far behind in the early polls—behind Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle and Steve Forbes (e.g., NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 1/99). McCain's surge came much later, closer to the early primary competitions and, hardly coincidentally, when McCain was receiving far more significant (and generally positive) media coverage.

The press attention to these early polls can amount to a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: Polls are primarily measuring name recognition, so high-profile candidates tend to do better. "Winning" the polls encourages more media attention, much of it about how a given candidate is maintaining their lead. When actual voters intervene in the process, however, the front-runners often become also-rans.

More importantly, early polls function as a way of giving media an excuse to ignore candidates—often the majority of candidates—who are deemed outsiders undeserving of media attention (Extra!, 10/03).

While reporters seem aware of the problems with overplaying these early polls, it's not clear that this awareness has any effect on their coverage. A recent Associated Press report (3/2/07) noted that an advisor to Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) called MSNBC's Chris Matthews to remind him that Dodd was running for president, even though he isn't polling very highly. Matthews responded by telling AP: "The hardest thing when I make my quadrennial resolutions is 'don't pay attention to early polls.... But it is so hard not to." A few days later (3/21/07), Matthews said about the polls on his own program, "I have to keep reminding myself they're worthless because I keep reading them."

Introducing a round-up of new polling data on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson (2/27/07), the anchor said to ABC reporter George Stephanopoulos, "It is very early to be polling." Stephanopoulos responded: "It sure is, but we're giving voters what they want, Charlie, apparently. We asked voters how closely are you watching the campaign right now, 65 percent said they were watching it closely. That is just extraordinary." Of course, it's a leap to imagine that when Americans tell pollsters they are closely following the election, they means they're looking for horse-race polling whose predictive value, almost a year before any actual voting, is essentially nil. More likely they are looking for coverage of the entire array of candidates that will help them make up their own minds about who they want to vote for.

Nonetheless, the press corps' early campaign story line is based largely on following these early polls. A Time story (4/2/07) about GOP contender Rudolph Giuliani predicted that "the political rule book has been stuffed into a shredder this year," the "conventional wisdom" shattered by the apparently inevitable victory of current front-runners like Giuliani or Hillary Clinton. Perhaps that will happen, but here's a formula for political coverage of the 2008 election campaign: Journalists would report on the public records and policy proposals of the candidates—all of them, not just the few media-anointed front-runners. Voters would then decide which candidate deserves their support. That would really shred the conventional wisdom.

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