THE TICKET

BY LAURIE GUILMARTIN

On Nov. 5, I thought I could see the pollsters and reporters seeking each other out for congratulatory handshakes.

They held their heads up high and said, “Well done!” and “Bravo!”

The reporters need to sit down.

Although the final polls were prophetic, the breakdown of data in the news was misleading or inaccurate.

From September until Election Day, I followed three news media and analyzed their poll coverage. I watched MSNBC, read the Los Angeles Times and read the blog Talking Points Memo.

MSNBC was lax about reporting the margin of error — the statistic expressing the potential sampling error in a poll. Not reporting this statistic gives the public an imprecise representation of which candidate slips or gains in the polls.

Talking Points Memo and MSNBC were consumed with the horserace. This kind of poll focuses on the scoreboard rather than candidates’ discussion of the issues.

All three media were guilty of creating a narrative to fit the polls, for the public to take hold of and follow. Pollster Nate Silver wrote on his political website FiveThirtyEight.com, “Data might be used badly… that might mean weaving together a narrative that isn’t supported by the demographic evidence.”

I followed the media’s coverage of polls in this past election because I found myself surrounded by numbers. Falling numbers, rising numbers — numbers that were represented by red and blue lines and bars that waltzed through graphs on newspapers, television and the internet.

Nancy Mathiowetz , a former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research said that in polling during recent decades, “There has been a proliferation of the number of organizations…with regards to the presidential elections.” Pollster.com, a website that publishes poll results and analyzes them, gathered data from 38 different public opinion organizations for this year’s presidential election. According to the different organizations’ websites, more than half of these organizations were established after 1980.

This year the numbers spat out by pollsters began to overwhelm other news.

The two weeks before the election, talk of polling increased exponentially. Every day Josh Marshall would discuss polls on his blog Talking Points Memo. He wrote on Nov. 1, “We’re spending a lot of time these days churning through all the latest and almost endless number of polls.”

On Oct. 23, Rachel Maddow said on her MSNBC show: “If you read the presidential polls like a Red Sox fan like me reads the box scores every day…you probably feel as if this race is stacking up pretty nicely for Barack Obama.” The polls turned the election into a game.

In the article, “Leading Economic Indicators, the Polls and the Presidential Vote,” Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, followed economic data and trial heat polls to forecast the winner of the 2008 presidential election in early August. They wrote, “Given the weak growth in leading economic indicators, the forecasts point to a cautious prediction of a Barack Obama victory.” When I read the article I stopped. Why was this necessary?“

Before there was polling there was horserace coverage,” said Scott Althaus, an associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois . “That isn’t new.”

Before FiveThirtyEight.com became increasingly popular, Silver’s primary occupation was as a baseball statistician and analyst for a sports media company. He wrote on his website, “What we do over there and what I’m doing over here are really quite similar. Both baseball and politics are data-driven industries.” In the last few days before the election, bloggers and reporters were throwing out poll numbers from all directions. Following polling data is like following baseball statistics — in trying to predict what will happen next. They are followed because they are fun to follow. Polls take away, however, from the coverage of issues in the news.

Althaus said some argue that not everything can be covered by cable news because of the limited amount of time they have. Horserace polls, he said, “might drive out coverage of the issues.”As an America gluttonous for polls continued to feed, the media created stories to frame these numbers.

Do you remember early September and watching the Republican National Convention? The crowd was a rolling sea of McCain-Palin signs. The crest of its wave was made out of homemade posters sprinkled through the crowd that read, “Palin Power!” or “Hockey Moms 4 Palin!”

Soon after the RNC, John McCain had a slight edge in the polls — but within the margin of error. While a CBS poll had McCain up by two points and CNN had both candidates at 48 percent, a USA Today/Gallup Poll had McCain at 54 percent and Obama at 44 percent with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, was worried. On Sept. 8 he wrote: “… the McCain camp has a consistent and aggressive message. They’re constantly on the attack and largely defining the debate. The Obama campaign is largely reactive, parrying the attacks.”

In a Los Angeles Times article from Sept. 10 titled, “Palin Bounce has Democrats Off Balance,” the authors looked at polls that showed McCain’s growing lead. Reporters Peter Wallsten and Janet Hook found that rather than being too reactive, the Obama campaign was being too aggressive. “Obama has responded aggressively this week to Palin’s presence on the Republican ticket,” they wrote. “…some Democrats are now worried about the perils of Obama’s strategy.”

After the RNC, Obama slipped in the polls. But the conclusion as to why this was happening was dubious — was this just a convention bounce? Was Obama too aggressive? Too reactive? In continuing to speculate and wonder why the polls were changing, the media provided a narrative to explain Obama’s falling poll numbers.

Thomas Patterson, a professor of political science at Harvard University, wrote an article for Public Opinion Quarterly titled, “Of Polls, Mountains. U.S. Journalists and their Use of Election Surveys.” He wrote that journalists craft superficial images to match the candidates’ support in the polls. When I spoke to him, he said the reporting the public sees has been degraded with the help of polling. “[People] feed into a press narrative,” Patterson said. “As the financial crisis hit and McCain began to slip in the polls, he became less appealing.”

At the end of September, Wall Street went into a tailspin. When I walked around Richmond, I would hear snippets of conversations about the economy — mostly with people asking each other, “How bad is this?”

The polls had started to turn during this time. On Sept. 17 a CBS/New York Times Poll had Obama up by five points among likely voters with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. A week later that poll remained stagnant.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote a blog titled, “Desperate McCain Reacts to Polling Financial Crisis,” in response to McCain asking Obama to call off the debate. In the Los Angeles Times, Noam M. Levey wrote in the article, “Obama Nudges His Lead Since Debate,” that Obama was making many strides, “convincing Americans that he can handle the toughest challenges facing the country….” On MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” for Sept. 24, Maddow said, “New polls out today show John McCain trailing Obama … so is that the strategy here, try to use an economic crisis as an excuse to hit the reset button … because the campaign is going poorly?”As McCain fell in the polls, he was painted as a scheming strategist who would do anything to change his poll numbers. As Obama began to move up in the polls he was confident — the candidate who could handle crises in a calm manner. But maybe what the media was saying was true. I was starting to wonder: Is it the chicken or the egg? Do the members of the media create narratives out of the poll numbers, or do the poll numbers just fit the narrative of the campaign that already exists?

When I called Althaus, I asked him this age-old question. He said he thought horserace polling factored into the narrative of the coverage. But Althaus said: “It’s definitely a chicken and the egg problem. It’s hard to sort out what is driving that [coverage].”

I asked him for some advice — what reporters should keep in mind when covering these polls. “The most important things to keep in mind is that polls are merely pieces of information that do not speak for themselves,” he said, “and the margin of sampling error is just one of many things to watch out for.”

It appears that the media has been taking these pieces of information and putting them into the frame of a bigger picture. There’s more. Not all of the information such as margin of error is even given to audiences.

After the first presidential debate this year, David Gregory of MSNBC discussed potential reasoning for the candidates’ actions during the debate. “Barack Obama is cautious about appearing angry,” Gregory said. “He seems/appears to have won that, in terms of the polling. More voters think that McCain has gone negative than Obama.”

What polling was Gregory talking about? Horserace polling? Specific polling regarding McCain’s negativity? What were the numbers here? What was the margin of error? No specific information was given while Gregory read into a poll that the viewer knew nothing about.

I spoke to Carolyn Funk, a survey researcher and associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, and discussed the differences between print and broadcast news. Funk said, “In television you can’t go into as much detail, while on print you’re getting more information.”

Every time the Los Angeles Times showed a poll, there was a blurb at the bottom of the page that reported how the poll was done and the specifics behind the poll such as sampling error. But wait. How long does it really take to give a couple of tidbits on cable news — such as what the poll was, or how accurate it was?

On “The Rachel Maddow Show” for Sept. 18, Maddow questioned the impact McCain was having among female voters. “Among white women, Obama is ahead 47 to 45 percent,” Maddow said. “Before the Palin pick, it was McCain who was ahead among white women… Now, he’s down among white women by two points.” The margin of error, which was not reported in the broadcast, was plus or minus three percentage points.

The New York Times reported the same polling numbers in their article, “McCain Seen as Less Likely to Bring Change, Poll Finds,” as an even divide among white women because the numbers were within the margin of error.

David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo made the same mistake as Maddow. He wrote on Oct. 24, “A new poll gives Obama his first lead in Georgia , 48-47 .” The InsiderAdvantage Poll Kurtz wrote about, was within the margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points. What Kurtz wrote was inaccurate. Obama was not in the lead in Georgia.

When these numbers are not reported, the information becomes misleading and can be misinterpreted by the public.

A poll in itself is not the issue. Although its value can be open to discussion, it is the reporter that must keep a check on his or her coverage of the polls. While too much coverage of the horserace can lead to the abandonment of other issues, it is the lack of information given about these polls and the stories that are created to surround them that could delude the public.

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