Since Cadell was his pollster, it would seem he should have told him before the prior Saturday.
Reagan's landslide challenges the pulse-taker professionFor weeks before the presidential election, the gurus of public opinion polling were nearly unanimous in their findings. In survey after survey, they agreed that the coming choice between President Jimmy Carter and Challenger Ronald Reagan was "too close to call." A few points at most, they said, separated the two major contenders.
But when the votes were counted, the former California Governor had defeated Carter by a margin of 51% to 41% in the popular vote” a rout for a U.S. presidential race. In the electoral college, the Reagan victory was a 10-to-l avalanche that left the President holding only six states and the District of Columbia.
After being so right for so long about presidential elections” the pollsters' findings had closely agreed with the voting results for most of the past 30 years” how could the surveys have been so wrong?
At the heart of the controversy is the fact that no published survey detected the Reagan landslide before it actually happened. Three weeks before the election, for example, TIME'S polling firm, Yankelovich, Skelly and White, produced a survey of 1,632 registered voters showing the race almost dead even, as did a private survey by Caddell. Two weeks later, a survey by CBS News and the New York Times showed about the same situation.
Some pollsters at that time, however, were getting results that showed a slight Reagan lead. ABC News-Harris surveys, for example, consistently gave Reagan a lead of a few points until the climactic last week of October.
The single exception to these general findings was the judgment drawn by the Reagan campaign's own elaborate poll ing operation, run by Richard Wirthlin, who claims that Reagan had a consistent five-to seven-point lead throughout the last two weeks of the campaign.
Carter's pollster, Patrick Caddell, on the other hand, still stands by his figures, which reflected a close race right up until the weekend before the election. On the Saturday before the election, four days after he had come off second best in the debate with Reagan, Carter was about even with Reagan, insists Caddell. But by Sunday night, he says, Carter's campaign had collapsed. Caddell's reason: the hostage issue was again in the news and again unsettled, thus reviving the public's frustration with Carter as a whole. Caddell's data shows Carter suddenly dropping five points behind by Sunday night, with another five-point collapse by Monday night.
The public opinion industry has christened Caddell's thesis the "big bang" theory of the campaign: 8 million voters moving to Reagan in 48 hours. To a large extent, most public opinion researchers support this theory, although many do so with major qualifications.
Says TIME'S pollster Daniel Yankelovich: "There is every reason to assume that is what happened. When people are conflicted, they procrastinate. And that's what they did in this election."
Warren Mitofsky, director in charge of the polling effort run by CBS News and shared by the New York Times, has produced a new opinion survey that seems to substantiate the big bang theory. Re-interviewing 2,651 adults who had been questioned before the election, Mitofsky found that some 13% of the voters changed their minds in the last few days of the campaign and that Reagan got the lion's share of the switchers. Says Mitofsky: "Caddell's thesis is consistent with what CBS found."
The Harris organization, which polled throughout the weekend and on Monday, showed Reagan gaining points right up to Election Day. By Monday night, according to Harris Executive Vice President David Neft, an unpublished Harris survey had Reagan six points ahead of Carter. Others picked up the trend too, and Wirthlin showed a widening gap through the weekend until Monday night when he, like Caddell, pegged the margin at about ten points in Reagan's favor. The Gallup survey, which eleven days before the election had Carter ahead by three points, found Reagan moving from 42% to 44% to 47% in its final survey, taken on Nov. 1.
Looking for explanations of what went wrong, Wirthlin believes that the other pollsters erred by estimating that there would be more Democrats in the final body of voters than there turned out to be. He also criticizes the others for asking the key presidential-choice question first instead of last, after asking about issues and impres sions of the candidates. This, he insists, produced a pro-Carter bias.
In mid-October, the discrepancies between Wirthlin's findings and those of the published surveys created a near panic in the Reagan camp. Under pressure from their colleagues, Wirthlin and his assistants spent a frantic three days reviewing their numbers and techniques. They decided they were right, but Caddell, for one, still believes that they had Reagan too far ahead too early.
One puzzling phenomenon that the pollsters have not been able to cope with, or even explain thoroughly, is the so-called closet Reaganite. For whatever reason, people clearly voted for Reagan in this election who had said they would not.
Everett Ladd, director of the University of Connecticut's Social Science Data Center, says flatly: "I am 100% certain that there was no 'closet Reaganism' in this election." Other pollsters tend to agree. But there is some evidence that suggests otherwise. Before the election, only 7% of the blacks surveyed by New York Times-CBS News said they were going to vote for Reagan; Election Day exit polling showed that 14% had ac tually cast their ballots for the Californian. But when re-polled by New York Times-CBS News, only 6% of blacks admitted they had voted for Reagan.
If the pollsters are united on one point, it is that they are not solely to blame for misleading the public; the fault must be shared with the press, they say, which has never fully understood the limitations of surveying.
Says Cuff Zukin, poll director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics: "We are overconsumed with predicting what will happen. Polls predicting who is going to win the election are worthless. First, they can be very inaccurate at the time of the election be cause they are only accurate at the time they are taken.
Negative voting, large numbers of undecideds, low turnout” all these factors made polling this year more difficult. Says Caddell: "This is the first election in which the voters didn't really like either candidate much."
Admits Yankelovich: "Our greatest fail ure was to not point out more clearly that the implications of our data were that great movement could occur."