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Are Campaign Polls Sleazy?

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from: Charles Cook
to: William Saletan

Posted Friday, Feb. 18, 2000, at 3:30 AM ET

Charles Cook is editor of the Cook Political Report and a political analyst for the National Journal and CNN. William Saletan is a Slate senior writer. Earlier this week Saletan penned this "Frame Game" arguing that "every campaign poll that asks about an opponent's flaws is a push poll," and that "real polls" can be just as invidious. In response, Cook posted the message below in "The Fray," Slate's reader feedback forum. Slate has asked them to continue their discussion about the merits and perils of campaign polling in this "Dialogue."

Like so many other journalists who don't cover politics full-time and have only a limited understanding of how campaigns work, Mr. Saletan doesn't get that campaigns are about arguments and issues. By road-testing arguments and issues, campaigns can determine which issues are most salient, which ones will work. So-called push questions on polls are widely used and widely accepted tools of survey research to determine what works. In fact, they are often used to test arguments against the candidate sponsoring the poll, to see what he or she is most vulnerable on.

dialogues
entries
1234
from: Charles Cook
to: William Saletan

Posted Friday, Feb. 18, 2000, at 3:30 AM ET
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Charles Cook is editor of the Cook Political Report and a political analyst for the National Journal and CNN. William Saletan is a Slate senior writer. Earlier this week Saletan penned this "Frame Game" arguing that "every campaign poll that asks about an opponent's flaws is a push poll," and that "real polls" can be just as invidious. In response, Cook posted this message in "The Fray," Slate's reader feedback forum. Slate has asked them to continue their discussion about the merits and perils of campaign polling in this "Dialogue."
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Highlights from The Fray (to be read after the week's most recent Dialogue entry):


The distinction between a legitimate public opinion survey and a "push poll" is quite murky. I have been doing polls for almost twenty years. In 1982 we wondered if voters were concerned about the fact that our opponent was divorced. We asked the following question:

All other things being equal, would you be more likely to vote for a candidate who had been divorced and remarried or for a candidate who had been married to the same woman for 23 years.

80% of the respondents didn't care about the divorce and 99.9% of them expressed anger at us for even bringing up the subject. Needless to say, we did not attempt to use this as an issue in the campaign. The question sounded like a "push poll", but it wasn't for two reasons. 1) We polled a sample of the electorate, not the electorate at large. 2) We were "kitchen testing" a potential issue and wanted to see how it played with voters.

From the outside, however, there is no way to know if we were polling or pushing. If there is one inviolate law of polling it is this: you can either send a message or get information. The latter is a poll, the former is a boiler room.

--Tim Rife

(To reply, click here.)


It is my considered opinion that anyone who pays attention to the poll results published either by any of the news media in whatever form, or by the politicians themselves, knows nothing about self-serving bigotry.

--James Smith

(To reply, click here.)

(2/23)

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