Measurement of Voter Attitude

Measurement of Voter Attitude

E

VERY four years the great game of

politics reaches a climax in the United States as the sovereign voters pass judgment on the achievements and promises of the major parties and elect a President. In the weeks and months preceding the election, all over the United States, a t country stores, in little towns, and in big cities, interested Americans discuss the campaign and speculate about the outcome. The process by which a President is nominated and elected filters the people's will through a kind of irregular filter, but i t is as American as a Missouri country school. I t is what the people desire, and in that sense it is democratic.

The election is the authoritative expression of the people's will.

GOVERNMENT

BY SAMPLE Aristotle described democratic government as government in which important decisions were made by the general body of citizens, and officials were chosen by lot. As far as the officials are concerned, this might be called, in the technical language of opinion pollsters, government by probability sample. I n our vast modern state where the mass of the citizens cannot serve collectively as a legislative body, if we followed Aristotle we might extend the application of the principle of~governmentby probability sample. Occasionally an opinion pollster grown enthusiastic about public opinion polls suggests that government officials would do well to follow the polls. This would amount to government by a sample of the population chosen by the pollsters.

Americans thus far have given little evidence that they want to be governed

by sample. I n fact, when the polls conspicuously fail to predict election outcomes successfully, the expressions of pleasure indicate the existence of some positive hostility toward anything like government by- sample.

When the polls failed in 1948, many Americans believed that their failure was wholesome for democracy. The "terrific licking7' taken by pollsters, newspapers, and radio commentators "was a splendid thing for the country," declared the Raleigh News and Observer. ''The people alone should decide elections." The Philadelphia Inquirer said: "Perhaps it's a healthy thing that the polls were so convincingly off base. Any feeling that they offer a reliable substitute for the ballot box in determining American political sentiment must disappear." The New York Times, seeing in the election results a demonstration of the independence and unpredictability of the voters, said, "Power still resides in the masses of the people, where it belongs." When President Truman happily told the 1952 convention of Americans for Democratic Action that the 1948 election results "set back the science of political forecasting for a full generation," he received a sympathetic response.

Not all political forecasting arouses the unfriendly feeling which was reflected in the President's statement and in the comment of the newspapers.

This feeling is inspired by polls which achieve such scope and reputatioh that they seem to rival the electoral process as channels for the expression of the popular will, and to serve as instruments for influencing opinion as well as for reporting it. As predictions merely,

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they are interesting to citizens who like to speculate about probable election results, or follow the scores of the game of politics.

A well-managed political organization has a t hand machinery for keeping in touch with public opinion in a way that may be superior to the commercial polls.

This type of opinion measurement, on which political leaders base analyses and predictions, is very old. How well it works depends upon the efficiency of the organization and the astuteness of the leaders.

Early in March 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison a letter in which he analyzed the prospects for the coming election. He said that, leaving out Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, the states seemed to be about equally divided. He had had favorable reports from members of his party about prospects in these three states. He wrote: Still these are the ideas of the republicans only in these three States, and we must make great allowance for their sanguine views. Upon the whole, I consider it as rather more doubtful than the last election, in which I was not deceived in more than a vote or two. If Pennsylvania votes, then either Jersey or New York giving a republican vote, decides the election. If Pennsylvania does not vote, then New York determines the election. In any event, u-e may say that if the city election of New York is in favor of the republican ticket. the issue will be republican; if the federal ticket for the city of New York prevails, the probabilites will be in favor of a federal issue. . .

This was a keen analysis of the situation. In the election New Jersey went Federalist, Pennsylvania's electoral vote was divided, and, thanks to a Republi-

can victory in New York City, New York's electoral vote was Republican.

More recently, Jefferson's political descendant, James A. Farley, has stated that in every campaign in which he participated as manager with Franklin D. Roosevelt as top candidate on the ticket, he made a practice of sending to Roosevelt a documented report on the probable outcome of the election, usually on election eve.l Mr. Farley's most remarkable prediction was that of 1936, when he predicted that Roosevelt would carry every state except Maine and Vermont, at a time when the Literary Digest poll was predicting a Republican landslide, and the newer polls, although indicating a Roosevelt victory, were far from predicting the sweeping victory that occurred.

Even such an astute political field marshal as Mr. Farley could not be expected to foretell election results with 100 per cent accuracy every time; but as long as he headed the party organization, his predictions were always worthy of high respect. Like Thomas Jefferson's, they were the products of a combination of art and scientific method.

Information was gathered from local areas, and the discerning mind of the master politician interpreted it as no mere statistician could.

Those of us who are not Thomas Jeffersons or Jim Farleys, or who do not have their facilities for gathering information, must depend more upon evidence gathered by others if we wish to try to foresee the political future.

Ordinarily we cannot place complete reliance upon the public predictions of political leaders who may be keeping their fingers on the public pulse, because their statements are likely to be overly optimistic, issued primarily to influence opinion rather than t o inform it. We may turn then to the com1 James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots (New York, 1938), p. 324.

mercial public opinion polls and get reports on voter attitudes that purport to be more objective every few days as the election approaches.

The general public first became widely interested in polls largely as a result of the publicity attending the Literary Digest poll. The Digest method of polling was to mail ballot cards to millions of people whose names were drawn chiefly from telephone directories. I t was successful in predicting the winner of Presidential elections until 1936, when it indicated that the Republican candidate would win by an electoral vote of 370 to 161. In the election he actually received only eight electoral votes. That ended the Literary Digest poll.

The chief weakness of that poll was that it did not reach a representative cross section of the electorate. Particularly in the depression years, many people in the lower income groups did not have telephones, and were therefore not listed in the telephone directories.

For this reason the ballots were not mailed to a representative cross section.

The ballots that were returned seem to have been even less representative. Apparently the collecting of ballots by mail was an even greater defect in the polling technique than the unscientific choice of a cross section in the first place.

Three polls using more scientific methods entered the business of forecasting Presidential elections in 1936.

They were associated with the names of George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald M. Crossley. I n 1936, 1940, and 1944 they were successful in picking the winning candidate. However, the Gallup and Crossley forecasts of state-bystate electoral votes were not as impressive as their predictions of the national popular vote, and they almost

always overestimated the Republican vote.

Mr. Roper's Fortune poll predicted popular vote results with remarkable accuracy, but avoided the more difficult task of predicting state-by-state electoral votes. After Roper's 1940 sectional figures were made available, Daniel Katz pointed out that the error in one section of the country was as hiqh as 12 per cent, and in no section of the country was the error less than 4 per cent.* The relatively large Roper errors had canceled themselves out.

This seems to be a hazardous way to arrive at accuracy.

By 1948 the pollsters had outgrown the caution that had been reflected in their pre-election statements of earlier years. The Gallup poll stated flatly that Governor Dewey would "win the Presidential election with a substantial majority of electoral votes." Mr. Roper said that his inclination was to predict the election of Governor Dewey "by a heavy margin," and added that the validation of public opinion testing in political areas was complete; "it is known that a scientifically conducted and antiseptically clean survey will coincide with the actual choice of the voters within a close limit of error."

The election that followed was a disillusioning affair. In 1948 there was a Dewey landslide of pollsters and journalists, but not of the voters; or it might be more appropriate to say that the pollsters and journalists got their feet off the ground and simply floated up into the clouds together. The election brought them down with a dull thud.

Under such circumstances, when a pollster wants to believe, and wants others to believe, that his poll was not really so great a failure as it seemed, 2 Daniel Katz, "The Public Opinion Polls and the 1940 Election," Public Opinion Qwrterly, Vol. 5 (Mar. 19411, pp. 52-78.

one of his first rationalizations is that public opinion must have changed between the time when the last poll was taken and the time the election was held. Shortly after the election results became known in 1936 the editor of The Literary Digest was quoted as saying: We may not have reached a representative cross section of the population in distributing the ballots. On the other hand, the last returns were received some weeks ago, and there may have been a shift in voting sentiment since then.3 In February 1949 Dr. Gallup told the Iowa Conference on Attitude and Opinion Research, "The biggest error which we and other polls made was in not taking a last-minute poll." Mr. Crossley said, "We did not catch the late Truman upsurge because we assumed campaigns do not change many votes and stopped polling too early."

Apparently most voters do make up their minds well before the end of the campaign, in an ordinary election year.

An intensive study of an Ohio county during the campaign of 1940 led Paul F. Lazarsfeld to conclude that in a sense "modern Presidential campaigns are over before they begin." The study indicated that only a small percentage of the people were so undecided that campaign propaganda could convert them, and the decisions of these voters would not considerably alter the ratio of Democratic and Republican vote intentions which existed before the campaign began.5 Of course this conclusion, drawn 3 New York Times, November 4, 1936.

Norman C. Meier and Harold W. Saunders (Eds.), The Polls and Public Opinion (New York, 1949), pp. 180, 164.

Paul F. Lazarsfeld, "The Election is Over," Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 8 (Fall, 1944), pp. 317-30.

chiefly from a study of the electorate of one county in one campaign, may not always be applicable. However, in the absence of some unusual factor, the changes in the last few weeks of a campaign are probably ordinarily inconsequential in their effect on the election result. If a steady trend toward one candidate is in progress, the polls should be able to discover it, and they should report it with some suggestion as to its probable effect on the election results.

Although a trend of this kind is likely to have only a negligible effect on the voting balance in the few days intervening between the last pre-election polls and the election, a failure to interpret it correctly is a polling failure.

The attitudes of politicians toward the commercial polls seem to vary greatly. President Truman holds them in contempt; but Charles W. Van Devander reported in 1944 that Governor Thomas E. Dewey had "never run for office without employing the private services of the Gallup poll to assay his chances of election."

Charles Michelson once expressed the view that the polls had a claim to validity comparable to that of astrological c h a r k 7 I n their public statements during campaigns, politicians tend to be particularly critical when the polls are going against them. Politicians consider it good strategy to try to create the impression that they are winning, and incline to minimize anything that tends to create an adverse impression.

After the election of 1948 the pollsters were not left to the mercies of the politicians, nor were they left to evaluate their own mistakes without Charles W. Van Devander, The Big Bosses (New York, 1944), p. 77. ? N e w York Times, May 23, 1944.

assistance. Individual academic authorities on public opinion presented diagnoses, and the Social Science Research Council appointed a Committee on Analysis of Pre-election Polls and Forecasts which recruited a technical staff to carry on an intensive investigation.

Out of the research and cogitation of this staff and committee came a fat volume entitled The Pre-election Polls of 1948 containing information on the polling procedures used, discussion of problems involved, conclusions as to the sources of error, and recommendations for opinion measurement procedures in the future.

One of the chief criticisms by the academic authorities was directed at the use of the quota sampling method by the commercial ~011s.~When the quota sampling method is used, the procedure is somewhat as follows: The managers of the poll find out that the total adult population of the country contains a certain percentage of such elements as men, women, farmers, urban dwellers, people in different income brackets, Democrats, and Republicans, and then they send interviewers out to interview a given number of people containing the same proportion of each of these elements as the general population.

The academic authorities contended that better cross sections could have been obtained by a procedure called probability sampling, in which the final determination of the particular individuals to be polled is left to chance, and the element of choice by interviewers is eliminated. When the probability sampling method is used, the country is broken into geographical "ensis Likert, "Public Opinion Polls," Scientific American, Vol. 179 (December 1948), p p 7-11; Frederick Mosteller and others, The Pre-election Polls of 1948, staff report of the Social Science Research Council (New York, 1949), pp. 115-18.

units and subunits, until finally the interviewers are directed to interview adult inhabitants in every third house in each block, or whatever is the desired proportion, in selected areas.

The theory of probability sampling is that such a procedure "is in conformity with statistical laws"; therefore "it is possible to calculate precisely the probability that the margin of error in any given sample will not exceed a given amount."

This should not be interpreted to mean that when the polls report the answers which respondents in such a cross section gave to the strangers who interviewed them, the statisticians can calculate precisely the probability that .the margin of error in the opinion reported will not exceed a certain amount. What it means is that theoretically the sample will contain the correct proportion of white persons, the correct spread of persons of different ages, persons with typical amounts of education, and similar characteristics, subject to a calculable margin of error.

There is no way by which the margin of error in the report of opinion can be calculated.

Dr. Gallup objected to dogmatic assertions that probability sampling was superior to quota sampling for use in election polls, and cited evidence which indicated that it had not proved superior in practice.1째 At the Iowa Conference on Attitude and Opinion Research he said that random sampling "has certain definite advantages under certain definite conditions," but he added that it was not "a cure-all." He stated that the Gallup poll had carried on experimental work through the years to prove its techniques, and that a new department was being established which would have the sole function of carrying on experiRensis Likert, op cit., p. 9.

Gallup, Letter to Scientific American, Vol. 180 (February 1949), p. 2.

9

10 George

mental work and trying out new suggestions for the improvement of polling techniques.ll

skill and caution. Most newspaper readers who read the reports of polls do not make that kind of interpretations.

I n a period when the polls are thrust into public attention, as they were in 1936 and in 1948, questions are raised as to their reliability and their social usefulness. When they are evaluated with such criteria in mind, one of the basic facts to be remembered is that Presidential election polls, as a rule, are considerably more reliable than polls on public questions and issues.12 This is true primarily for two reasons: (1) Presidential election polling is done with more care, one feature of which is the use of larger samples; ( 2 ) most of the people being polled have heard about the candidates, have formed fairly definite opinions about them, and the question they are asked is clear and definite.

I n contrast, when a poll is on an issue, replies come from people who are a t all stages of forming opinion, and who have widely different degrees of interest in the subject and widely different degrees of knowledge about it.

Under such' circumstances different polling agencies may get very different results on similar questions. A slight variation in the wording of the question may make a considerable difference in results. When the opinion that pollsters are attempting to measure is such that a slight difference in the wording of a question will cause a significant change in the results, the interpretation of results should be made with great l1Norman C. Meier and Harold W. Saunders (Eds.), The Polls and Public Opinion (New York, 1949), pp. 221-22. l2See Robert Cobb Myers, "Vital Part of the Poll Question," New York Times Magazine, January 2, 1949, pp. 8, 31 ; Rensis Likert,

Behind the replies, the degrees of knowledge and interest of the people who give them are highly important.

I n this connection a statement made by Angus Campbell, University of Michigan Survey Research Director, is pertinent. He said: We have consistently found in our studies of the adult population that not more than a quarter of the people of this country are sufficientlyfamiliar with world affairs to converse readilv in terms of specific people, issues or events. . . . At the other end of the scale is a fraction of about equal size who seem virtually oblivious to such matters. They do not follow the news and their knowledge of such monumental developments as the Marshall Plan, the NATO, or even the United Nations is virtually nil. Between these high and low quartiles are the remaining half of the people, having some general acquaintance with what is going on in the world but little specific knowledge.l3

09. cit., p. 10.

Nevertheless, commercial pollsters report issue poll results in a tone of certainty, sometimes even to the tenth of a per cent! Stuart Chase wrote in 1948 that none of the commercial pollsters really liked to do polls on Presidential elections. "Mr. Gallup, indeed, complained of stomach ulcers every four years," he said.14 None of the pollsters complain of getting stomach ulcers from conducting polls on issues, because nobody can come up next 13 Third National Conference U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, January 29, 1952, press release. l 4Stuart Chase, "Are the Polls Finished?"

The Nation, Vol. 167 (December 4, 1948), p. 626.

Wednesday morning and prove definitely that their results were wrong.

Even though Presidential election polls are likely to be considerably more reliable than polls on more abstract subjects, they involve particular problems. Many persons who are legally qualified to vote will not vote on election day, and the pollster has no way of finding out certainly which ones will vote. People vote for various reasons.

One of Mr. Dooley's characters said: " 'I'm with Clancy's candydate,' he says. 'He niver offered to enlist for th' war,' he says, 'but 'twas Clancy put Terence on th' polis foorce an' got th' school f'r Aggie,' he says." l6 Whether because the citizen is grateful for a job, or because he is a farmer who wants farm subsidies continued or a worker who remembers a time when government was less friendly to labor or a businessman who wants favorable legislation, or for some other reason, some voters will take the trouble to vote and others will not. Those who have a vital interest a t stake, those who are angry, those who have a crusading spirit, are more likely to vote than those who feel no strong emotional urge.

Furthermore, they are likely to count for more in their influence on others.

An efficient organization will get out some voters who would not otherwise vote.

Another problem, one not peculiar to election polls, is that of getting correct information from respondents. The average individual likes to go along with the crowd. If he thinks he is not going along with the crowd, he may give a noncommittal answer when a stranger comes around and asks him how he is going to vote. A pollster may also find it difficult to get revealing information from some respondents when they have little enthusiasm for either candidate.

15 Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War (London, 1899), p. 90.

Doubtless a number of voters in 1948 simply voted for the candidate whom they considered the lesser of the two leading evils.

A few critics of the polls consider them an unmitigated evil. A few would like to see them abolished, or at least regulated by the government. One of the charges brought against them is that they influence elections because of bandwagon psychology. How much influence of this kind they exert in Presidential elections is problematical. In 1948 they may have had more influence in the opposite direction, causing the Republicans to develop a debilitating self-confidence.

The influence of preconvention polls, when candidates are struggling for the party support which will give them the nomination, is another matter. Because party leaders are anxious to nominate a candidate who can win the election, they may pay considerable attention to the polling reports which purport to show the relative popularity of the candidates with the electorate. Democrats may be a little less inclined than Republican politicians to pay attention to such polls. They have had the experience of winning elections when the polls were against them. They have been accustomed to having the newspapers against them in both national and local elections, and they have found that such opposition need not be fatal.

Actually, the preconvention polls are less reliable than the pre-election polls.

They are somewhat comparable in accuracy to polls on issues.

The preconvention poll must be considered an agency which may influence the nomination, and which may be used in an attempt to influence the nomination as a newspaper attempts to influence the nomination through its editorials and its treatment of the news.

In the period preceding the 1952 Republican national convention, the myth that "Taft Can't Win'' was largely a creation of the polls. Except for the polling reports, no very substantial evidence was presented to justify such a conclusion. Consider the following bombardment of releases: On February 13 a poll report was that Taft and Eisenhower were running "neck-and-neck" among Republican voters; March 2 that Taft polled 34 per cent and Eisenhower 33 per cent among Republican voters, but that Eisenhower held a big lead among independent voters; March 5 that the voters would prefer Kefauver to Taft if they were pitted against each other; March 7 that the voters would prefer Eisenhower to Kefauver; March 19 that Eisenhower led Kefauver, but Kefauver led Taft in thirteen southern states; .April 9 that Eisenhower led Taft by a slight margin among Republican voters and was preferred by independent voters by more than three to, one; April 12 that Eisenhower was the favorite Republican candidate among veterans; .April 18 that Kefauver led Taft; April 20 that Eisenhower beat Kefauver; April 25 that Democratic county chairmen thought either Governor Adlai Stevenson or Senator Kefauver could beat Taft; May 1 that Eisenhower was favored over Taft by both Republicans and independents.

Such polling bombardment constituted one of the most serious kinds of opposition that Senator Taft had to face in his campaign to win the Presidential nomination, the success of which depended upon the support of victoryfamished Republican politicians.

To say that the polls are wolves in sheep's clothing would be a harsh and unjustified characterization, but they are not all sheep. Their influence has not been wholly good, but they have contributed to the development of improved techniques of opinion measurement-a desirable development. As Jane Ace says, "We have to take the bitter with the better." The polls should not be destroyed or taken over by the government, and we should be wary of government regulation. The remedy for the potentialities for harm in the commerical polls lies in the development of more sophisticated readers.

The citizen who desires to speculate perspicaciously about the outcome of the election will find the polling reports useful. He should consider them as evidential rather than prophetic, and he should make some allowance for their tendency to overestimate Republican strength. He may familiarize himself with Louis H. Bean's studies of election trends and Mr. Bean's estimates for the coming election, remembering always that the trend curve may make a bobble in its upward, or downward, course this year. He may also get enlightenment from history in regard to the relative weight of prosperity and corruption as campaign issues, and the types of candidates that have been elected and have failed to be elected in the past. When the intelligent citizen has done all of this, if he wishes to know the outcome of the election a t the earliest possible moment, he will still have to sit up on election night and listen to the returns coming in over his radio.

Charles W . Smith, Jr., Ph.D., is a public opinion analyst in Washington, D.C. He has taught political science at Indiana University, Rutgers University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Roger B. Taney: Jacksonian Jurist (1936) and Public Opinion in a Democracy (1939). and co-author of Government and Politics in Alabama (1941).

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You have printed the following article: Measurement of Voter Attitude Charles W. Smith, Jr. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 283, Meaning of the 1952 Presidential Election. (Sep., 1952), pp. 148-155.

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[Footnotes] 2

The Public Opinion Polls and the 1940 Election Daniel Katz The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1. (Mar., 1941), pp. 52-78.

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The Election Is Over Paul F. Lazarsfeld The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 3. (Autumn, 1944), pp. 317-330.

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