April 2001

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Board members Bonnie Angelo, Clyde Ensslin, John Woestendiek and Robin Daughtridge talk to students about career opportunities during a Friday session.

Board discusses polling, campaigns

Presidential race, Florida ballots lead weekend's topics

Photo by Maricarmen Josephs

Harrison Hickman, principal pollster for Al Gore during last year’s presidential campaign, wanted it clearly understood — the election-night projection fiasco wasn’t his fault.

"I spent most of my time that day telling people they had bad numbers," Hickman said, referring to the major networks’ premature and inaccurate projections of the presidential vote in Florida.

Hickman discussed political polling and the media with School faculty and staff members, students, and members of the School’s Board of Visitors during the Board’s spring-semester meeting Feb. 23-24 in Carroll Hall.

"Although the elections are several months behind us, polling in predicting winners and shaping the news is a major issue for analysts, the media and voters," said Dean Richard Cole. "The program provided valuable insights into how polling affects all of us."

In addition to his work with the Gore campaign, Hickman has been an election consultant with CBS News for 18 years, serving as the principal election-night consultant to Dan Rather since 1988. He has extensive experience in North Carolina, having worked for the late Sen. Terry Sanford, Sen. John Edwards, Gov. Jim Hunt, and most recently, the gubernatorial campaign of Dennis Wicker. He is a partner in Hickman-Brown Research Inc. in Washington, D.C.

In his Friday afternoon discussion, Hickman criticized news media during the campaign for having the "tendency to make political races seem much closer than they are." For instance, he said, news reports often cite a poll’s margin of error as an indication that a race may be even closer than the poll suggests, without explaining that the margin of error could just as easily indicate a wider actual gap between the candidates.

He also presented computer graphs charting daily election tracking polls and explained how the networks often pick a single day’s voter opinion rather than assessing average trends. Significant variation can occur in the numbers from day to day, he said, so the more accurate interpretation of the numbers is a computed average.

Polls, Hickman said, can not only measure who’s ahead in a political race but also provide insight into voter perceptions and opinions.

"A large amount of our time is spent finding out what voters know," he said, citing an example he recently found that most Americans do not believe there is a surplus in the federal budget. He questioned the effectiveness of fiscal policy when much of the electorate has no idea about the condition of government funds.

On Saturday, a Republican pollster got his turn, revealing findings from his 2000 post-election survey.

Whit Ayres, president of McHenry, Ayres and Associates of Roswell, Ga., said that in the business of political polling, hardly anyone sits on the fence.

"People in my business (work for) one side or the other," he said. "My instincts have always been conservative."

Ayres received his doctoral degree in political science from UNC-Chapel Hill, and he joked with the audience about the difficulty he faced remaining a Republican among a department of political liberals during his time in Chapel Hill.

Ayres revealed some interesting findings from his nationwide survey of 1,200 respondents who claimed to have voted in November.

"More people thought Bush was smart than Gore was honest," he said.

Overall, he praised George W. Bush’s campaign strategists for focusing on the candidate’s strengths and his likeability.

Board member Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich Partners in Atlanta, also discussed polling as the dinner speaker Friday night. Smith used various poll results to discuss changing American attitudes, and he said that using the proper methods, polling could give a more accurate determination of the will of the electorate than voting.

In a panel discussion the next day, Professor Phil Meyer said he was intrigued by Smith’s theory, particularly in light of the irregularities in the recent Florida vote count. Meyer is advising USA Today, in a joint project with the Miami Herald, on methodological and analytical issues arising in the course of evaluating ballots from Florida’s 67 counties.

Meyer showed audience members a document reporting Florida county election results. In one county, the document showed that 412 of the 585 registered voters had actually turned out to vote. But Gore has lost 16,022 votes in that county alone.

Professor Robert Stevenson, who along with Meyer led the session, criticized the television networks for forming coalitions, particularly on election night when only one or two sources are giving several networks their information. Stevenson said competition among networks promotes excellence and care in reporting.

Renner Vaughn is a junior in the electronic communication sequence.