Modest Acclaim for Poll Scoop
By JOHN TIERNEY - New York Times
Newspapers have been accused of overplaying their own polls, but last week we had the opposite problem in this space. We led the column with evidence that Howard Dean was the favorite to win the Iowa caucuses, since he was the first choice of thousands of traders on intrade.com, a political futures market in which speculators risk real money on the outcome of the caucuses.
Then we mentioned in passing our own poll, conducted the week before the caucuses, of three dozen workers at bars, restaurants and hotels in Des Moines frequented by the presidential candidates and their staffs. The workers' clear pick to win the primary was Senator John Kerry, a forecast we did not believe but duly reported with the caveat that the poll had "no history whatsoever of accuracy."
Well, now it has a history. As far as we know, it was the most accurate poll in Iowa. Some other polls on the eve of the caucuses had Mr. Kerry ahead but with a margin so small that the race was considered a statistical dead heat. Our poll had him way ahead, and that was true even with the workers surveyed six days before the caucuses, when other polls still showed him behind.
We have accordingly conducted a second survey — call it the Political Pints Poll — this time among 36 workers at eight campaign hangouts in Manchester, N.H. (hotels as well as restaurants and bars like Strange Brew, Cotton's and Richard's). This time it looks as if the conventional polls have caught up with ours. We detected a slight increase in anti-Kerry sentiment ("Kerry is scary," one waitress rhymed), but Mr. Kerry and his staff members were once again described as the nicest customers and best tippers. And once again, the workers picked Mr. Kerry to win. Half the respondents predicted he would win the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.
It could be argued that the respondents were biased because of the higher tips given by Mr. Kerry and his staff, but the predictions were not based solely on customers' behavior. Dr. Dean finished second (just under a third of the respondents said he would win), but he and his staff members were rated the worst customers because of "snooty" and "condescending" attitudes.
Mistaken Forecasts Simply Explained
Why, before the Iowa caucuses, did so many nonbartenders make such lousy prophets? Why did supposedly savvy journalists declare Mr. Kerry's candidacy dead? Why did so many veteran politicians rush to jump on the Dean bandwagon just before it turned into a sinking ship?
Everyone's favorite authority on the Iowa caucuses, David Yepsen, the political editor of The Des Moines Register, said his gut told him to disregard the polls showing Mr. Kerry's surge. "I think Howard Dean's still in pretty good shape," he said last week on "Fox News Sunday," and agreed to bet a quarter that Dr. Dean would win. His faith in Dr. Dean's get-out-the-vote organization was shared by television analysts Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson and most other talking heads who made predictions.
In some ways, there was nothing new about these mistakes. "I said John Lindsay would win the presidency in 1972, and that taught me never to make another prediction," said Jeff Greenfield, CNN's senior analyst. Conventional wisdom, Mr. Greenfield said, is still shaped the way it was when Senator Eugene McCarthy was the hot Democratic presidential candidate in 1968.
"McCarthy said that reporters are like blackbirds," Mr. Greenfield recalled. "One flies on a telephone wire, they all fly on it. One flies away, they all fly away. If a guy's up in the polls, he's doing everything right. If he's falling, everything he does is wrong."
But even if the basic mistakes haven't changed, today there are a lot more of them, thanks to the lengthening campaigns and round-the-clock news channels and Web sites. Even if political journalists wanted to avoid horse-race speculation and write about issues, they could not fill the year before the Iowa caucuses with analyses of candidates' health care plans.
As analysts constantly search for new angles to fill the news cycles, politics has become subject to what the blogger Mickey Kaus has named (in honor of a friend who thought it up) the Feiler Faster Thesis: voters as well as journalists process information so quickly that candidates can switch tactics instantly and turn around campaigns overnight.
On his Web site, kausfiles.com, Mr. Kaus has warned journalists to keep the Feiler Faster Thesis in mind before they write off candidates or anoint winners. In the winter of 2000, when critics said that George W. Bush's rightward turn in the primaries would doom him in the general election, Mr. Kaus presciently predicted that Mr. Bush would have plenty of time to transform himself into a centrist.
But Mr. Kaus seemed to forget that lesson himself in early December, when he declared that Mr. Kerry "faces not just defeat but utter humiliation in the New Hampshire primary." He started the Kerry Withdrawal Contest, offering a prize to the person who came up with the best cover excuse for Mr. Kerry to drop out of the race. Mr. Kaus went on ridiculing Mr. Kerry's chances up until the caucus results. When the punditocracy assembled on Thursday in a college gymnasium to cover the debate, Mr. Kaus had some explaining to do to his colleagues.
"I pooh-poohed the Kerry surge just out of general wishful thinking," said Mr. Kaus, who once described Mr. Kerry as an "animatronic Lincoln." Although he continued to doubt Mr. Kerry's ability to win the nomination, he conceded that the candidate looked "remarkably lifelike" in the debate.
"At this point I don't see how he can lose the New Hampshire primary," Mr. Kaus said. "Of course, coming from me that's probably the kiss of death."
Honor Roll
GIANT PANDER AWARD Five years ago he introduced a bill to change the calendar of the presidential campaign by establishing regional primaries, but in the debate on Thursday, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman enthusiastically renounced his own plan. "I will pledge to the death," he told the audience in Goffstown, N.H., "to protect the New Hampshire primary."
METAPHOR OF THE WEEK "He looked like a prairie dog on speed." (Former Senator Alan K. Simpson, describing Dr. Dean's concession speech in Iowa.)
Seth D. Gilmore contributed reporting for this column.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
