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By TOM LITTLEWOOD


Election '82: the hollow power of the polls

WHILE the news media were splashing their pages and their screens with wimpsical drivel about the personalities of the candidates for governor — and with inaccurate and overblown opinion polls — most of the voters of Illinois went seriously about the business of sorting out the issues and their interests.

The campaign was a striking study of contrasting styles with James R. Thompson, the shameless media politician, engaging in various forms of video stuntsmanship, while his opponent, Adlai E. Stevenson, stubbornly refused to come to terms with the demands of modern mass communications. As one of the reporters who covered his campaign remarked, "Adlai is what he is, and the media are what they are, and the two don't fit very well."

Thus, if the press can be considered to possess some collective psyche, which it does, it was easy to slip into a reassuring mind-set: Adlai the fumbling, bumbling candidate. Adlai falling way behind. Pick up the chips, folks, it's all over for Adlai.

The trouble with the published polls, besides the obvious fact that they were way off the mark, was the way they drowned out the discourse which is supposed to continue throughout a campaign. The Associated Press, to its credit, transmitted a steady diet of meaty stories in the days just before the election, but they were not widely used by downstate editors who had been convinced by the polls that Adlai the inept was finished.

In the harshly competitive Chicago market, almost every media outlet has a piece of an "exclusive" poll. Eager to exploit the poll, editors sometimes overplay the results. Not only is other campaign news overpowered, but the prominence of display cannot help but have an effect on the attitudes the polls are presumed to be measuring.

Ralph Otwell, editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, told me before the election that the replacement of that paper's traditional straw poll with a telephone poll conducted from New Jersey by the Gallup organization was not necessarily a permanent change. Although it had the advantage of using a secret ballot and a huge sample, the straw poll was always risky when the voter turnout was uncertain. It is one thing to know that the turnout will be predictably low, but it is quite another to pick out the voters in your sample. One of the reasons the Sun-Times hired Gallup was that organization's expertise in designing screening questions to identify likely voters.

Stevenson's share of the vote was badly underestimated by both the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune's telephone poll (conducted by Market Facts of Chicago).

The Tribune also engaged in some questionable reporting of the poll figures at the end of the race between Democrat George Dunne and Republican Bernard Carey for president of the Cook County Board. In the Sunday paper before the Tuesday election, the Tribune printed a story headlined "Carey Leading Dunne as Battle Seesaws." This was based on interviews the previous weekend giving Carey 45 percent to Dunne's 40 percent with 15 percent undecided. On the next day — Monday — the Tribune had Dunne back on top with 43 percent to Carey's 36 percent and an uncommonly high 21 percent undecided. That polling was done the previous Thursday and Friday — before the Sunday story was published showing the Republican candidate ahead. Dunne won easily, as the Sun-Times poll had indicated he would.

In an earlier poll report, the Sun-Times revealed the unsurprising information that Thompson's pleasing image was one of the main reasons voters preferred him over Stevenson. The media, of course, played a not inconsiderable part in the creation of that image, and many editors cited the difference in personalities in their Thompson endorsement editorials.

Most Chicago editors readily agree that their campaign coverage was too personality oriented. Invariably they blame their competitors for setting the tone. Will it be any different next time? The Sun-Times will probably resurrect the straw poll in revised form, but other than that there is little reason to expect major reforms.

In his new book How the Media Missed the Story of the 1980 Campaign, Jeff Greenfield contends that most political reporters are obsessed with the mechanics of a campaign. (Did it matter, after all, that the Stevenson campaign staff went through four press secretaries?) Discussing the Reagan-Carter race, Greenfield endeavors to show how the media "disparage the entire process, [treating] campaign rhetoric with skepticism bordering on cynicism, if not with outright contempt." By portraying electoral politics as a spectator sport, a struggle for power, journalists strip the people of any reason to care about the outcome of an election, according to Greenfield. This may be the most important lesson behind the Year of the Wimp in Illinois.


December 1982 | Illinois Issues | 37


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