Zogby Pollster Explains Methodology on Presidential Data Gathering

Critics of political endeavors such as who we select as our country's president will cynically claim that the corporate news media will focus way too much time on gleefully revealing which candidate is leading a certain race based on their own polling data. They enjoy doing that rather than explaining campaign positions of all the individuals running to the benefit of the nation's voters so they can make their choices after being properly informed on what is going on in the world.

Yet one could argue the point that presidential polling should be viewed as an art, not any type of proper science, because many times a pollster's prediction on who will win the national election based on their own surveys can end up being wrong once the real contest takes place.

The most infamous election in which a public prediction of who was to win ended up being incorrect was the 1936 national contest between incumbent Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, who was seeking a second term as chief executive, over Republican challenger Alfred Landon who was then the Governor of Kansas.

A then popular magazine called Literary Digest had been conducting its own survey with its readers since 1916 on who was going to be elected by having them return postcards placed in the magazine that they would then name who they were going to vote for and had correctly predicted the winner via that arcane manner in five straight elections.

So when the several million postcards which had come back to the magazine's headquarters that fall were counted it indicated Landon would defeat Roosevelt by a 57 percent to 43 percent vote tally with the GOP candidate winning 370 electoral votes in a landslide blowout.

The magazine's prediction of a GOP upset was wrong by a mile, because Landon ended up only winning two states from the northeast part of the country and received just eight electoral votes in the most lopsided defeat in election history.

And the reason why the Literary Digest survey was way off with its prediction?

Because they did not use any type of demographic sampling to properly determine who was returning their postcards since the magazine's readership base turned out to be more conservative and more affluent than most Americans who were suffering during the decade of the Great Depression. That unintended bias of their subscribers' lifestyle did not correspond to the millions of actual voters who were to cast their presidential choice in favor of the man who gave them the New Deal and literally killed off the magazine.

Pollsters learned from that monumental basic mistake and began questioning an apportioned representative sample of the actual population to gather the correct data needed to determine who would win.

One of the more successful polling organizations of recent years has been the Utica, New York based Zogby International polling company which is run by John Zogby.

Zogby has described himself in a 2004 interview with the New Yorker magazine as being the 'George Gallup' of this generation, referring to the famed pollster who in 1936 had ironically and correctly predicted FDR would win re-election in a landslide by surveys he conducted with a representative sample of the American voting public.

Zogby is a graduate of Le Moyne College and Syracuse University and tried to enter politics himself in 1981 when he was an unsuccessful candidate for mayor in his home city of Utica.

But instead he got into the polling business where he has gained a reputation of being accurate prognosticator on national politics.

He correctly predicted Bill Clinton would win over Bob Dole in 1996 by less than ten percentage points when others had it listed as a double digit blowout and that Al Gore would take the popular voting tally in 2000. Yet he apparently wrongly publicly guessed John Kerry would win in 2004 even though his own polling data revealed George W. Bush would win re-election that year.

So what are the methods of Zogby's examination into the presidential crystal ball for 2008 and beyond?

Fritz Wenzel is the communications director for Zogby International and says their surveyors can contact just 400 randomly selected people in the right demographic makeup across America who can speak for the nation on any one issue or preference of candidates.

"It's a scientific fact," he stated in an interview. "You do, of course, have a margin of error built in. But research shows this size of sample can be representative of a nation as a whole."

So how are prospective voters questioned on their beliefs and support for a particular candidate?

"We randomly call people who maintain listed telephone numbers," Wenzel explained. "We recently conducted a study of differences between random dialing and dialing from a listed sample, and there was virtually no variation in result. This was conducted over the course of several surveys on a wide variety of topics."

The pollster adds the questions for each survey is different, but that all the queries are constructed by a committee, not any one individual. Calls to a subject last an average five minutes, with a limit of questions so to not exceed too much of the recipient's time.

Wenzel also says the Zogby group is entirely independent of any particular political persuasion.

"A party or a candidate will hire us for a particular polling project, but we work regularly for both sides of the aisle," he revealed. "In terms of horserace polling, we have a standard format we have used for years that is always followed. No clients get to change that wording and we always have the final say over all wording in our surveys."

But, with land-line telephone usage decreasing and more people, especially the younger ones, only using a cellular phone or the Internet to communicate Wenzel admits their organization is having to adjust to the new reality.

"This is an increasing problem in the opinion research field with plummeting response rates on the telephone," he spoke. "This is in part because people consider it more of an intrusion than they used to, as well as the switch to cell phones. The latest wrinkle is the explosive growth of Internet telephony, where people get their phone services over the Internet."

"Still," he continued, "our sample is always big enough to get an accurate representation of the American public or any sample we need to represent."

Yet the vocal supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul have been crying foul with their claims his current low popularity in the rankings are a result of being ignored by the pollsters.

"Yes, we hear this complaint often from the Ron Paul people," Wenzel acknowledges. "But we put little stock in that argument. If there was such a groundswell for him we would have picked up on it because that many people couldn't all fall outside the societal norm as it pertains to telephone usage or Internet usage."

How much does he discount those complaints?

"We think this claim is akin to the grassy knoll gunman theory about the Kennedy assassination," he added. "It's a nice theory, but there are no facts to back it up."

And Wenzel believes they are reaching the entire spectrum of American voters, not just the diehards of both political extremes who would be the most willing to answer questions over the phone from a stranger to boost their side's support.

"We don't have any trouble getting moderates to respond to political polls," he emphasizes. "The thing about a poll is everyone is fascinated in what their neighbors think, and almost everyone still likes to have their voice heard through a poll."

Yet Wenzel admits that even though Iowa and New Hampshire get to go first in choosing each party's eventual presidential nominee leading up to the general election, the two states don't accurately reflect the entire nation's mood on such choices.

"But they do pay closer attention than the nation at large," he adds, "so they play a useful role in winnowing the field without the rest of us having to be bothered."

What are Wenzel's thoughts about a long-shot third party or independent candidate's chances of winning the White House next year?

"We released an op-ed piece this spring about New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg being a possible independent candidate with some juice," the pollster said, "because he could pull from both sides of the political aisle and we see moderates as being increasingly important in this election. Plus, he has so much money available that he could buy a turn-key campaign operation."

And how does the Founding Fathers' most last legacy when writing the Constitution of having the Electoral College select who gets to be America's chief executives fit into the 2008 presidential contest?

"To do an accurate representation of how the Electoral College would break, you would need to poll in each state," Wenzel says.

"However," he continued, "because of the predictability of so many states in elections today it is reasonable to project outcomes by assumptions about certain states and adding to that polling data from specific swing states. That is done a lot, and we will be doing a lot of that over the course of the next thirteen months. But it is far too early right now to undertake such estimates because there are far too many variables right now."