Democrats and Networks Are at Odds Over Polling
By JIM RUTENBERG and CARL HULSE - New York Times
DES MOINES, Jan. 14 — Officials of the Democratic presidential campaigns and the Iowa Democratic Party say they are worried that the major television networks will unduly influence next Monday's caucuses by reporting poll results before the voting is over.
At issue are polls, conducted jointly by the networks and The Associated Press, of voters entering the caucuses. In letters to the networks this week, the state party asked that they not report any of the results until at least a half-hour after the deliberative voting process starts at 7 p.m., Central time.
But network executives said in interviews that they would not promise to delay reporting such early data, although, they added, they will avoid declaring winners until receiving some results of actual voting.
The standoff comes little more than three years after both major parties accused the networks of driving away late voters in Florida by erroneously reporting, before all the voting ended, that Al Gore had won the state in the presidential election.
"We don't want to do anything to hinder their ability to report the news," said Mark Daley, a spokesman for the Iowa Democratic Party. "We just want to make sure they're not creating the news, yet again."
At the core of the debate is the issue of just how much influence the reporting of such data has on the Iowa caucus process. Democratic officials also question how accurate the polling can be anyway, given that the process allows voters initially supporting a candidate who falls short in the early going to then throw their support elsewhere. Such realignment typically begins about a half-hour after a caucus's onset, the length of time the networks are being asked to delay.
Party officials in Iowa have raised concerns about these "entrance polls" for decades. But they are voicing all the more concern now, saying that the close nature of the race here leaves more room for polling inaccuracies and that increased use of gadgets like portable e-mail devices and cellphones makes it easier for news of early polling to spread through caucus sites, some of which will have televisions, too.
For instance, the argument goes, take voters who plan to support a less popular candidate like Representative Dennis J. Kucinich but who in particular do not want Representative Richard A. Gephardt to win. If those voters hear polling results suggesting that Mr. Gephardt is pulling away, they might quickly throw their support behind a stronger challenger, like Howard Dean.
Some campaigns say they are especially worried that the pollsters could mistake out-of-state supporters of one candidate or another for real caucusgoers, an error that would naturally skew the polling results.
Network officials, who note that past entrance polls have largely been in line with the actual voting results, maintain that the party's fears are overblown. With voters safely tucked away at caucus sites, the executives argue, they are mostly out of range of news outlets. As for concerns about cellphones and portable e-mail, Linda Mason, a vice president of CBS News, said: "The party should make sure that they don't use them. Like in the movies, they say turn it off."
If the entrance poll data seem definitive, Ms. Mason added, CBS News will not hesitate to characterize them Monday night in the network's intermittent caucus coverage, which starts at 7 o'clock, local time, the hour at which the caucuses themselves begin.
"If the results showed a clear-cut front-runner, I think we'd report that," she said. "We're in the news business, I might remind you. We would tell people that `this is the snapshot as people are attending the caucus, and we'll bring you the end result when we have it.' "
In any event, network executives were skeptical that they could possibly have great influence on so educated an electorate as the one here.
"Of all states," Ms. Mason said, "Iowa is a state where people are not influenced by things like this."
And Warren Mitofksy, one of the poll's architects, said he did not understand why it would have any more influence on the electorate than the daily polls that news organizations already report.
"Do they want to stop the precaucus polls also?" Mr. Mitofsky said. "Are they going to tell The Des Moines Register not to publicize their polls either?"
To which Mr. Daley, of the state party, replied, "We just want them to give us 30 minutes."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
