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November 2, 2004

Host: Michael Grant
Topics:
· Polls;
· Campaign 2004 highlights
In-Studio Guests:
· Bruce Merrill, Director, KAET/ASU Poll;
· Mike O'Neil, O'Neil Associates.

>> Michael Grant:
Tonight on "Horizon," the polls have just closed in our state and while we wait for election results we'll look at polls of a different kind. There are too many media polls? Do they wrongly focus on the horse race aspect of the election? And do polls accurately mirror public opinion?

>> Crowd: 1, 2, 3, 4, we make...

>> Michael Grant:
Plus billionaires for bush, and other lighter moments as we look back at the 2004 election. Good evening, I'm Michael Grant. Turnout in today's election could reach a level we have not seen in years, perhaps ever. Secretary of State Jan Brewer says she expects a phenomenal number of Arizona's 2.6 million registered voters to cast ballots today. Brewer expects higher numbers than the 71% of Arizonans who voted in the presidential election four years ago. You want to keep it here on Channel 8 for election 2004 coverage. We'll join PBS NewsHour coverage at 8:00 p.m. At 8:30 we expect to bring you the first numbers from here in our state. Then at 9:00, join me with political analyst Steve Tuttle and Stan barns as we go over the numbers in the state races and proposition. Then at 10:00 we return to NewsHour coverage of the presidential race, and other important national races. Leading up to Election Day, pollsters try to measure how candidates and proposition sit with voters. Thanks to a proliferation of media, you can find any number of polls and not all of them reach the same conclusions. In a moment I'll talk to a couple pollsters about the science and the art of their profession, but first Paul Atkinson looks at the growing concern over polls and the role they play.

>> Paul Atkinson:
A headline on CNN's inside politics website reads, poll, Americans skeptical about election. The same might be said about polls themselves. Who's got the lead in the presidential race? One poll says bush lead over Kerry widens. Another, Kerry leads bush in U.S. Midwest. But, wait; bush edges ahead in Iowa. Kerry narrows gap in Iowa. Or how about this? Bush, Kerry tied nationally in Harris ZOGBY and post surveys. Whew! It's enough to make your head spin. It's almost comical. It's actually good sport on a day to day to take a look at the different polls and see folks bouncing up and down.

>> Michael Grant:
The latest KAET poll found President Bush's lead over Senator Kerry in Arizona cut by about half --

>> Paul Atkinson:
Polls are everywhere, television, radio, newspaper, and online. There are even poll trackers for those who want to see the changes in poll results from one day to another.

>> Voter:
Every day there seems to be a different poll and you can go from channel to channel to channel and you have a different poll and different results. So personally I think all it does is confuse an individual, if they believe that polls are the way to go. I don't.

>> Voter:
I do think that they're -- they're misleading. They can actually in and of themselves tip eat election one way or another. There are some people who want to vote for the winner.

>> Paul Atkinson:
Bob Grossfeld works with polls as a political consultant. He's fine with polls that are reported with plenty of analysis on why someone or some thing is up or down. But surveys are not always reported that way. He points to "Horizon’s” KAET/ASU poll and what happens with it once it's released.

>> Bob Grossfeld:
It's picked up and reported by the AP and disseminated statewide and everybody else picks up on it, and what happens is at every step along the way, some of that careful detailed analysis, the stiff in-- oh, the scientific prism through which you folks are looking at it drops off. So by the time it hits a radio station, somewhere in rural Arizona, the story has now become, "prop X is overwhelmingly popular." And now let's move onto the next story. That's the problem.

>> Paul Atkinson:
The lack of depth in reporting poll results mirrors another media problem, the over reliance on polls by news organizations. Grossfeld says polls can supplant instead of supplement in depth reporting of important campaign issues.

>> Bob Grossfeld:
I think the biggest concerned I have is that polls -- reporting of polls seems to have in many cases started, if not completely, replaced covering the campaign itself. It's just so easy to do if you're on the media side of things. You get a poll, or you conduct your own, and now the story is the story, if you will, that you report, who is up, whose down.

>> Paul Atkinson:
While the validity of polls conducted by major media organizations is rarely challenged, that's not the case with those done to push political or policy goals.

>> Maria Baier:
There are polls that are used primarily for P.R. purposes. You want to demonstrate to an elected public official that people love this and therefore they should endorse it or, you may want to start to get the electorate on your side on a particular issue and people are very much bandwagon voters. If somebody thinks that something is real popular, they're more likely to support it than if they think it's unpopular. So right away you want to get out the gate with a P.R. poll that says, hey, everybody loves this, no reason for you not to love it.

>> Announcer:
There's a certain magic about being in Arizona --

>> Paul Atkinson:
This is one of many campaigns that Maria Baier worked on as a public policy advisor to governors hull and Symington. She says even the words used have a direct impact on how people respond. Take the issue of protecting open space.

>> Maria Baier:
There's a nuance to the word preservation to some groups. For example, agricultural landowners, the sportsman's community, anglers and hunters, preservation to those groups can connote something like wild lands, an area that cannot be touched by human beings, wilderness areas. Whereas conservation can mean something where there is trails and there's interaction with human activity, which they're okay with, more so than the wilderness where you have endangered species protections and those kinds of things.

>> Paul Atkinson:
Baier admits P.R. polls won't go away any time soon but that major media polls may if they continue to increase in number and frequency.

>> Maria Baier: I actually think the proliferation has been educational for the public. It might be a good thing overall because ultimately what it's going to do is de-emphasize polling because people are going to understand, wow, looks like they're asking the same question and they're getting such vastly different results. Maybe in the long term it's going to be a better thing.

>> Michael Grant:
Joining me now is Bruce Merrill, director of the KAET/ASU poll, Dr. Merrill a political science professor in the Walter Cronkite school of journalism and mass communication. Also here is Mike O'Neil of O'Neil associates. Dr. O'Neil has been conducting opinion polls for 25 years. We counted. Gentlemen, good to see you.

>> Mike O’Neil:
I'd like to verify that.

>> Michael Grant:
Bruce, I see you all the time. Mike, I haven't seen you in a while. It's good to see you. Resist the temptation to say no to this question, do we have too many polls?

>> Mike O’Neil:
We have -- the thing that I agree with most that I heard is that -- not so that that we have too many, but too much attention is paid to the least important aspect, the horse race. I think we're pointing the finger the wrong way. We may sell alcohol but it's the media that's drunk.

>> Michael Grant:
A lot of the proliferation of polls has to do with the proliferation of media outlets, this 24 by 7 by 365 routine we have going.

>> Bruce Merrill:
Absolutely. I think what people forget is the American media system is based on the free enterprise system. We have polls in the media because people like them. If they really didn't, they wouldn't be there, frankly.

>> Michael Grant:
Bruce, I get this question all the time, and it happened to us several times, we'd come out with a poll, pretty close in time NAU would come out a poll, the republic would come out with a poll, we would be four, five, six points difference. Why?

>> Bruce Merrill:
First of all, let me say it's not the reporter's fault or the public's fault but there is unrealistic expectations about the accuracy of polls. Polls can vary by what kind of a sample they're measuring, whether or not they're all adult heads of households, registered voters, most likely to vote, the day they were taken, one day later Kerry change a poll, whether or not they were truly random or not, how the question was word. There are so many variables that really relate to how a poll is conducted that to directly compare them the polls would have to be the same on all of those variables, and even then, because of something called sampling probability theory, they could vary 8 to 10%.

>> Mike O’Neil:
A couple points about that. Look at this election. Okay? We got an incumbent president at a time war. Bush is going to win by a landslide, right? No. There's a consensus. Everybody agrees, this election is going to be really, really close. How do we know that? We know that because fundamentally all the polls agree. We're worried about the second decimal point b a couple points here, couple points there. There is widespread agreement in nearly all the polls that this election is very, very close. And that is the only reason that we know that.

>> Michael Grant:
Well, but many times, though, you will see that 8, 10-point spread and a lot of people --

>> Mike O’Neil:
One point about that. First of all, the 8, 10 spread, if you talk about Kerry at 47, bush at 49, okay, and Kerry goes up 2 and bush goes down 2, we went from plus 2 to minus 2. That's reported as a 4 point switch and it's really only a 2%. We're taking each individual number, subtracting one from the other, which doubles the margin, then take another poll with the same thing and doubling it again. So really the change is less than it would seem. I think the problem is we obsess too much about differences that are really not significant. There have been very, very few a couple of them, instances where there was an out liar and usually that one came back in within a couple days.

>> Bruce Merrill:
I was going to say I think Mike's explanation is 100% correct but it shows part of the problem. Polls, when you're really talking about surveys that are scientifically done, they're very technical and they're based upon a lot of scientific theories and practices, and they're very hard to explain to laymen. They really are. I mean, it's not an easy thing to do.

>> Michael Grant:
I know, I took six hours and I seem to recall I got Bs.

>> Bruce Merrill:
Should we tell people what you got in my class?

>> Michael Grant:
I have heard this from a number of people that -- talking about the science of polling that with the proliferation of cell phones, changes in lifestyle habits when people are likely to be home, and more importantly perhaps when they are not likely to be home, it is becoming increasingly difficult simply to put together a technically sound scientific poll. Any truth to that?

>> Bruce Merrill:
I think it's true. Non-response, when Mike and I started doing polls here in Arizona 25 years ago, our non-response would run 5, 6, 7, 8%. Today, depending on how you keep track of it, it's probably 40 to 50%. And certainly these -- using cell phones, et cetera, have the potential to affect the quality of polls. There's not a lot of evidence so far that they have, but there's certainly the potential that they could. Mike, if I recall correctly, if you've got your ideal random sample and you get a non-response, you go to a fallback, but that has --

>> Mike O’Neil:
It's always an insufficient activity, and what you've described here, there are a number of threats, I'm fundamentally in agreement here, there are a number of threats that has made our work increasingly difficult. It requires more effort. It's more expensive to do the same level of quality. But up to this point, the empirical evidence, and it is studied on a continuous basis, empirical evidence is that the fundamental accuracy of the enterprise is maintained. It is, however, increasingly difficult because all of those observations that you make have elements -- they're fundamentally true. All of them make our job more difficult.

>> Michael Grant:
Now, let's move away from the horse race aspect of this and get to the why of it. How good are polls at not just saying, okay, it's 49 Kerry, 45 Bush, but saying, here is why it is --

>> Mike O’Neil:
I think they're much better about the why than they are about the what, because we're not concerned about the second decimal point anymore. The broad observation, for example, that bush is perceived as better for national security and that Kerry is perceived as better for education or healthcare or some of these things, these also have been things that have been persistent for decades. There's a great deal of truth in that. And it's kind of like in the commercial area, when we find out -- ask about product attributes, that information is absolutely unassailable. When we ask how much would you pay for that, then it gets a little tricky and the accuracy of the response differs because people don't absolutely know. The vote, who are you going to vote for, for someone generally conflicted, and who is going to vote is a little touchy, the underlying reasons we're more accurate about that than the final conclusion.

>> Michael Grant:
How do we go about that, do we go about it with focused questions, open-ended questions, sometimes a combination of both?

>> Bruce Merrill:
Well, let me just finish up a comment that Mike made because I think it's important. The polls that are reported in the press may be one or two percent of all the polls conducted in America. The parties conduct their own polls. The candidates conduct their own polls. Corporations conduct their own polls, et cetera. What was your question now?

>> Michael Grant:
How do we go about determining why the? Focus questions? Open-end questions? Combination of the two?

>> Bruce Merrill:
Let me answer that by saying, I know Mike academically would agree with this, the biggest problem that any pollster has when you do a question is the measurement of non-attitudes. We tend to structure questions that are easy for people to answer whether or not they have an opinion or not. I mean, if you say, I'm going to read to you a list of names, tell me if you like them or don't like them, and you put a placebo in, guess what, 50, 60% of the people, they like that guy.

>> Mike O’Neil: Moderately like, because their moms taught, if you can't say something nice about something, don't say anything at all. So we're very suspicious of the vague but non-effusively vague category.

>> Bruce Merrill: Again, I think it is possible to measure fairly accurately a concept, like Mike said, particularly when you get into issues, and that's why polls are more used, for instance, to develop political strategy. You just don't see them, than to do something like report the horse race aspect.

>> Michael Grant: Why don't we just do most likely to vote? I mean, after all, if we're trying to predict an election result, why don't we throw out general population and only do most likely --

>> Mike O’Neil: Generally at this time of year we do, it's just that there are as many methods for doing that as there are people do that it. They share a fundamental core. Did you vote last time? How interested are you in the election? Do you know where your polling place is? These are the kinds of questions that --

>> Michael Grant: Can you name the president --

>> Mike O’Neil: These are the kinds of questions to the core of a likely voter screen. Typically at this point almost everybody does it. But they differ in terms of how deeply they go and how -- this is, again, like my pricing analogy. We know some people won't vote. There's a relatively moderate number easy to predict, have no interest and they've never voted before. There are others that are predictable voters. It's how we allocate those people in the gray area.

>> Michael Grant: Let me --

>> Bruce Merrill: Let me add one thing because I agree with Mike. The other dimension to that is many people do it and they do it differently. Nobody does it real well. You have to go clear back to 1956 when gallop put together 7 or 8 questions, tried to predict who was going to vote and then went and saw if they vote and I think he was 60% right. I think that's about the best that basically has been done.

>> Mike O’Neil: The good news is -- even if you're wrong in individual cases, if you're right more often -- better than 60% in terms of the type of people, so the people who they misclassify who didn't vote but likely to vote, tend to resemble those who are likely to vote. If it weren't for that fact, we would be worthless.

>> Michael Grant:
This is also being complicated tremendously, is it not, by the fact we have a half million new registered voters in this state from 2000 to 2004?

>> Bruce Merrill:
And that's very hard because I think that I can make a very good case that you can't really use any poll to predict an election. There are just on too many variables, particularly when you have in Arizona 480,000 new voters, these people don't have a history, frequently of voting, a lot of new voters, lot of minority voters, it's hard to predict who is actually going to vote, and I keep telling people at this time that polls are irrelevant now anyway because the only poll -- it's a cliche', but the only poll that counts for these guys and women is the poll on election day, and the candidates simply need to get their people to the polls and whoever does that best is going to win.

>> Mike O’Neil:
And no poll is going to accurately measure how good the various parties are -- are going to be a few days from now in get out to vote.

>> Michael Grant:
You're telling me you and I have been wasting our time for the past ten months one Tuesday a month.

>> Bruce Merrill:
But, Mike, we get the big bucks.

>> Michael Grant:
Do polls measure public opinion or do they drive public opinion?

>> Mike O’Neil:
I think fundamentally they measure. This is this old saw you do a poll and everybody will follow it. I've never really seen convincing evidence of that. About the only place where it is true, early on in a campaign, polls -- they're reflective of what people's attitudes are at a given point in time, if you do something early in a campaign and it shows somebody way ahead, the other guy is going to have a devil of a job raising money.

>> Bruce Merrill:
Like getting money, getting volunteers, getting that kind of stuff.

>> Michael Grant:
But you discount the "I want to vote for a winner" phenomenon?

>> Bruce Merrill:
All I can tell you is academically there's been a number of studies, the bandwagon fact, there's no study that doesn't demonstrate that exists.

>> Mike O’Neil:
If that were really the case you would never have anybody coming from behind and winning, and all people ahead would get further ahead. That's not the way it happens.

>> Michael Grant:
Almost out of time. Want to touch on loaded questions. You have to be sensitive on the phrasing of questions.

>> Bruce Merrill:
You do, particularly in a society where we have key words or loaded words that really mean something different than what the word means that are sensitive to minority groups or various groups in the population. And it is very clear that how you word a question, that the outcome of a poll is an artifact of the way you ask the question. There's no question about that.

>> Michael Grant:
A little bit like a debate.

>> Mike O’Neil:
But the corollary to that, therefore, is if particularly if you have a question on an attitudinal issue, you listen to the answer, the fallacy is taking that as if it were written in stone, that is, one response to one particular stimulus. Word it another way, get a different answer. Don't look for one of these to be right. Both of them collectively tell you something about how people feel. That's not in the case of are you going to vote for bush or Kerry, we understand what those words mean, but in terms other question, look at them all and figure out the nuances of opinion.

>> Michael Grant:
Mike O'Neil, thanks very much. Good to see you. Bruce Merrill, always good to see you.

>> Bruce Merrill:
You have to see me.

>> Michael Grant:
Channel 8 will bring you both national and local election coverage starting at 8:00 p.m. That's when Jim Lehrer and the NewsHour team will begin coverage from Washington. Then at 9:00 please join me and political analysts Stan Barnes and Steve Tuttle as we break down election results in Arizona. NewsHour will be back at 10:00 for another hour of coverage of what is the most intensely watched presidential race in years. It's been an election year like no other symbolized by negative campaign ads and divisive rhetoric but the 2004 election has also had its lighter moments. A look back at some of those here in Arizona.

>> Paul Atkinson:
Popular incumbents have the luxury of shunning debates but that wasn't case at the University of Arizona in October. Arizona's senior senator squared off with a Phoenix high school teacher trying to unseat him.

>> Stuart Starky:
No child left behind labels schools as failures so that more and more of our tax dollars can be shifted into private schools and into charter schools and it's into tax credits. No child left behind needs to be put away and put away forever.

>> Paul Atkinson:
The debate wasn't just educational. It was entertaining.

>> John McCain:
Well, I want to thank Mr. Starky for his dedicated work. He is obviously an excellent and outstanding teacher and I wonder why he wants to leave an honorable line of work to go to the United States Senate.

>> Stuart Starky:
The reason is, senator, if we paid teachers what we paid senators and gave them the same health insurance, maybe they wouldn't have to look for something else to do.

>> John McCain:
Point well made.

>> Stuart Starky:
Then I'm done.

>> Paul Atkinson:
ASU hosted the final presidential debate. It brought all sorts to campus.

>> Marchers:
Billionaires for bush.

>> Paul Atkinson:
The supporters of President Bush, they are not.

>> Marchers:
This is their taxes.

>> Marchers:
Their taxes.

>> Reporter:
They used parody to make a point.

>> Monet Oliver D’Place:
My name is Monet. I am national coordinate coordinator for get on the limo. We are here with the Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff chapters of billionaires for bush reminding how voters All-American how good it's been for so many, expensive for so many.

>> Student:
At first we were like, who are they. This is why he shouldn't be our president.

>> Student:
I think it's great, I hate bush and totally support what they're doing because it's a funnier way to go about it.

>> Paul Atkinson:
Some onlookers figure out the costumes and signs protesting influence of big money and big business in politics. Others do not.

>> Monet Oliver D’Place:
Well, the beautiful part Billionaires for Bush is that some don't get it. So we come in and chant four more wars, they chant four more wars with us, because the truth is four more wars is good for big business, it's good for profit.

>> Marchers:
1, 2, 3, 4, we make money when there's war. 5, 6, 7, 8, Halliburton is really great.

>> Paul Atkinson:
They may not be billionaires but a few millionaire journalists were among those covering the presidential debate, also president were practitioners in the art of spin, as demonstrated by fox news Sean has not tea and Kerry advisor Chad Clinton.

>> Sean Hannity:
I am going to be him tonight. Doesn't matter how bad Kerry gets beaten tonight. He is going to say Kerry wins. That's what spin is.

>> Chad Clinton:
We won the first two.

>> Sean Hannity:
You lost the second debate. He wants to be a host. He wants to be a host. What you're going to see is passion and genuine concern. Are we going to see flip-flopper tonight? Are we going to see the dolphin tonight, flipper?

>> Chad Clinton:
Are we going to see furious or smirking and scowling bush.

>> Sean Hannity:
Is it possible he will vote to raise taxes on the stage tonight?

>> Chad Clinton:
He's voted to cut taxes.

>> Sean Hannity:
You mean cut defense.

>> Chad Clinton:
No, that's not true.

>> Sean Hannity:
Weaken America's defense. All right. See?

>> Chad Clinton:
Will George Bush admit a single mistake tonight?

>> Sean Hannity:
He never made one.

>> Chad Clinton:
Have you ever made a mistake?

>> Sean Hannity:
No, never.

>> Chad Clinton:
Of course not. That's why he likes Bush.

>> Paul Atkinson:
The spin got so bad after the debate you might say hit really gone to the dogs.

>> Triumph The Insult Comic Dog:
I thought the president really showed a lot of class today. I thought John Kerry, he hit out of the park. I thought the president was really caught exaggerating. He wasn't on his game. I thought John Kerry looked stunned -- who wants me to spin for them? Come on, I'll whore, too.

>> Michael Grant:
No spin but lots of analysis along with election returns as they come in tonight add 8:00 the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, followed by "Horizon" election coverage from 8:00 to 9:00. Stan Barnes and Steve Tuttle joining me to talk about Arizona election results. Then NewsHour returns at 10:00 with more nationwide election results. Up next, a look back at the presidential debate hosted here in Tempe. Thank you very much for joining us this evening. See you in just a few minutes. I'm Michael Grant. Have a great one. Good night.

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