Leo Bogart
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 Elections are not horse races.
For the first 150 years of the American republic, newspaper accounts of election campaigns dealt with the statements and actions of candidates and their supporters. As marketing and public opinion surveys acquired acceptance and credibility in the 1930s, the press began to report the findings of presidential preference polls. Their reputation tumbled in 1948, when the three best-known pollsters, George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley, showed Dewey ahead of Truman. But as the advent of television heightened media competition, so did the demand for up-to-the-minute election forecasts.
Political strategists themselves relied on privately sponsored polls to select themes and positions for their candidates and released favorable findings selectively to gullible reporters. Survey findings made headlines and led off newscasts. They brought drama and excitement into campaigns in which personalities seemed to matter more than principles.
Since 1988, a series of Markle Foundation-sponsored studies has tracked the transformation of campaigning from a debate of serious issues into a "horse race" of rivals. In the 1996 election, 53% of evening network newscast stories dealt with this aspect, while 37% addressed policy matters. Three fourths of the time of the newscasts showed newscasters rather than candidates, who were typically limited to seven-second sound-bites.
This state of affairs continues in 2000. The emphasis on poll results is deplorable because it takes the spotlight away from policies and ideas. It is also senseless because of the limitations of the polls themselves.
Most of the leading polling organizations are run with a high degree of professionalism (though one much-quoted pollster, Frank Luntz, has been charged with unprofessional conduct by the Ethics and Standards committee of the American Association for Public Opinion Research). They strive for accuracy and their methods are rigorous. But all face a declining willingness to cooperate with interviewers - a by-product of irritation with telemarketing. (The U.S. Census's current experiences reflect this phenomenon.)
Apart from the resulting technical difficulty of projecting survey findings to the population at large, election forecasts carry a special burden: after establishing the public's preferences, they must determine who is actually going to vote. Pollsters attack this subject with intelligence and ingenuity, but their adjustments inevitably remain inexact, especially in primary elections that draw only a fraction of the electorate.
Even if survey findings were precise at any moment in time, public opinion is notoriously volatile. Even though most voters form their judgments early in a race and are unlikely to change them, a substantial number remain on the fence until the last possible moment, and others vacillate or switch under the pressure of current events. Third party candidates complicate choices. In a close contest, these elements make prediction hazardous, regardless of which candidate appears to have the edge.
The media emphasis on who's ahead deflects the public's attention from what is really at stake, from the very real and material implications of victory for one candidate or another. Are news organizations at all likely to forego the opportunity to tell us who's winning? In the battle for audiences, you better believe they won't!
Leo Bogart, a former president of the American and World Associations for Public Opinion Research, is the author of "Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion" (Transaction Books).
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