Where Independent Pollsters and Politicians Diverge
In the last week of May and the early part of this month, three independent national polling organizations reported that President Bush trailed Democratic challenger John F. Kerry by anywhere from 5 to 8 percentage points.
The findings by Gallup, the Los Angeles Times and CBS News seemed to buttress each other. But embedded in the surveys was another string of figures that were less publicized and less uniform. The share of Democrats and Republicans surveyed did not jibe from poll to poll.
Gallup found Democrats and Republicans in almost equal numbers when it asked voters to identify their party alliance. CBS reported an 8-point advantage for Democrats. And The Times poll found a 13-point gap, with 38% of respondents calling themselves Democrats, compared to 25% who said they were Republicans.
The relative paucity of Republicans in The Times poll unleashed a flurry of complaints from GOP activists -- led by Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for Bush's reelection campaign, and David Winston, a prominent GOP pollster.
Dowd put out a statement calling the poll "a mess." Winston wrote a column for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call that said the poll was flawed.
In response, Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus said the newspaper's surveys, as with many others, had found party affiliation a notoriously fluid characteristic among respondents. She also noted the similarity among the three surveys in the Bush-Kerry matchup (The Times poll had the Massachusetts senator leading the president, 51% to 44%).
At its root, the dispute over The Times poll exemplifies differences between how independent polling organizations and politicians view survey results and party preferences.
Independent pollsters think many voters have relatively unsettled political party allegiances. When asked to name the party they favor, they might be swayed by recent news events or even by questions asked earlier in a survey, the pollsters say.
Political operatives, in contrast, tend to believe that party identification is more static. They say they can predict at any given time, with some precision, the party breakdown among the nation's voters.
News pollsters' views on party affiliation are reflected in their questions. CBS asks respondents if, "generally speaking," they view themselves as Republicans, Democrats or something else. The Times asks registered voters: "Regardless of your party registration or how you have voted in the past, do you usually think of yourself as a Democrat, a Republican, or an independent, or something else?"
