Interview With Pollster John Zogby Next US chief has to heal the meanness

OCT 18, 2004 Interview With Pollster John Zogby Next US chief has to heal the meanness

IN MR John Zogby's mind, there's little question that the electorate in the United States is divided into what he calls 'two warring nations' - one favouring President George W. Bush in the upcoming Nov 2 presidential election, the other siding with his Democratic challenger, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

The increasingly sharpening divisions are over ideology - conservative versus liberal - and over the very core values of the American system, which has long prided itself on tolerance and magnanimity.

'Each side feels that if the other wins, it would be the end of the Republic,' Mr Zogby told The Straits Times during an overnight visit to Singapore sponsored by Reuters.

'Whoever the next president is, he is going to have to be, first and foremost, a healer - or at least someone who stops this widening, this deepening of ideological divisions in the US. The ugly thing is, this meanness has spilled over from the halls of Congress to Main Street, US.'

What Mr Zogby thinks of the American Republic's predicament matters - not just because he is widely considered to be one of the country's most accurate pollsters, but also because he has studied and taught history and the culture of societies.

It's not so much the arithmetic behind the statistics in polls but the sociology of respondents that matters, he said. That means it's the personal environment of the respondent that ultimately determines his or her political choices.

'Societies need to have sustained civility in their political discourse,' he said. 'Remember the election of 1800?'

'Well, let me tell you,' the bespectacled Mr Zogby said. 'It was a bitter election, and Thomas Jefferson was finally declared the winner. His first exhortation to Congress was 'We're all Federalists, we're all Republicans, so let us proceed to bond, to heal our wounds'.'

That is Mr Zogby's way of saying that President Bush has been 'the most divisive president in modern American history'.

'Republicans and Democrats aren't talking to each other across the aisle,' he said. 'In Congress, they used to swim together, play tennis and racquetball, and they used to party together. Now they don't even know one another's names. The civility has gone.'

It has gone, in his view, because President Bush deliberately chose to ignore the 'creative centre' that traditionally energised American politics.

From the very start of his term in January 2001, Mr Bush resolved that he would go as far right as the political structure would tolerate. Unfortunately, the very tolerance that has signified magnanimity permitted Mr Bush to take his policies to unprecedented locations rightward.

'The danger of ignoring the 'creative centre' is that you then cannot appeal to both sides in the political and sociological game,' Mr Zogby said. 'That's why the next president has to be like Thomas Jefferson. The American political system simply cannot take any more of this push to the right.'

Mr Zogby - he's clearly flattered when he's called Professor Zogby - belongs to an industry that, as elections and public-opinion sampling go, is relatively young.

In their 1988 book, Polls and Surveys: Understanding What They Tell Us, Professors Norman M. Bradburn and Seymour Sudman say that the presidential election of 1936 brought the new 'science' of polling to prominence when three independent polls (by Crossley, Gallup, and Elmo Roper) predicted Franklin D. Roosevelt's victory over Alf Landon.

They point out that these polls stood in stark contrast to the prediction of the Literary Digest that Roosevelt would receive only 40.9 per cent of the vote. As in its widely publicised reports about public opinion over the preceding decade, the Digest rested its 1936 prediction on a tally of ballots returned from millions that had been mailed out across the country.

That Crossley, Gallup, and Roper had the audacity to base predictions on relatively small samples (compared to the two million ballots on which the Digest based its claim) was itself newsworthy, according to Prof Bradburn and Prof Sudman.

'But when their projections were borne out by the election returns, the validity of modern polling had been established. The point had been made that the way a sample is drawn is more important than its size. Bias towards the affluent inherent in the lists from which the Digest had drawn names - telephone subscribers and owners of automobiles - could not be offset by large numbers,' they say.

They also point out that in 1848, Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet advanced the idea of the 'average man' by arguing that the concept of the normal distribution of observations around a mean could be applied to analysis of society as well as to the physical world.

Polling has come a long way since then. Globally, it's now a US$4 billion (S$6.77 billion) industry annually. It employs nearly 100,000 people and has five distinct sectors - academic/non-profit; private; mass media sector; government; and in-house.

In 1939, the firm of Rensis Likert developed polling for the US Department of Agriculture, the first such operation within an agency of government. Polls by Hadley Cantril provided then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, with valuable information on American public opinion throughout World War II.

The Office of Public Opinion Research he established in 1940 at Princeton University conducted research into the methodology of polling and became a central archive for polling data. In 1941, the National Opinion Research Centre, now at the University of Chicago, was established.

In short, everyone polls nowadays - corporations conduct polls in order to determine how to launch new brands or reinvigorate old ones; politicians poll in order to focus their campaigning funds on specific regions and communities; companies even poll their own employees to assess corporate morale and productivity; media organisations poll readers to determine their reading habits - and often adjust their coverage accordingly.

All this means that Mr Zogby is a pretty busy man - and certainly a wealthy one. His 20-year-old firm, Zogby International, based in Utica, New York, conducts polls in several dozen countries.

Of Arab descent, Mr Zogby is especially interested in Middle East issues, and is currently undertaking a series of polls in Iraq about issues such as the viability of establishing a genuinely democratic state there.

But isn't polling still a somewhat uncertain science after all these years? There's little question that after the 2000 presidential election in the US - when the key state of Florida was first awarded to Democrat Al Gore, then to his Republican challenger Mr Bush - polling took a huge black eye.

It suffered a solid blow to the solar plexus this May when virtually every major poll in India predicted that the ruling United Democratic Alliance led by the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party would easily be re-elected.

And, of course, there's the mother of all polling disasters: In 1948 almost every American pollster predicted that Harry S. Truman would be defeated by Governor Thomas E. Dewey; Truman won by almost five percentage points.

'Polling can be uncertain only if you rely on statistics alone,' is Mr Zogby's riposte. 'That's why an effective pollster has to rely on culture, history and sociology. I repeat, polling is the study of human behaviour, not simply a sampling of people's preferences.'

That may well explain his success. His big test will come on Nov 2. In Singapore last Friday, he flatly predicted that Mr Kerry would become the 44th President of the United States.

Mr Zogby looked at his questioner with some irritation. But it could have been the fatigue on his face after a 24-hour flight from New York.

I find the claim that President Bush has been "divisive" to be outrageous and laughable. The President came into Washington and promised a new tone, and he kept good to that effort for months after the Dems started trashing him and creating the "hate Bush" movement. Then came 9/11 and the country all got behind President Bush for 6 months or so, until the Dems realized that if the country stayed united behind the President and the war effort they would not stand a chance in the coming election. So about 6 months after 9/11 they started creating dissention and once again the "hate Bush" mantra resurfaced. The cynical Dems have kept up this tone since then though it hurt the country and our soldiers fighting terror in Iraq.

Ultimately, all the Dems care about is regaining power, regardless the cost to the country or the people. They have encouraged our enemies and undermined our economy intheir goal to regain power. Meanwhile, President Bush has tried to work with them, and given them many things they wanted in the domestic agenda. But these people cannot be trusted, nor compromised with, nor appeased. They are deceitful and ruthless and must be squashed once and for all.

I'm older than dirt, and I've never seen this country divided like it is today. We've always had a division between liberals and Conservatives, but it's turned into a chasm with hatred on both sides.

I've heard a lot of people say this, so there must be something to it.

This rift will not be healed, nor should it be. "Healing" in the liberals lexicon means succumbing to their wishes for socialization of this country, and we've done that far too long.

Agreed.

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