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Gingrich as Speaker: Remembering When

September 28, 2007 10:02 AM

Newt Gingrich’s long flirtation with a run for president – this week he’s promoting an “American Solutions” agenda and appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”– warrants a look at public opinion during his tenure as House speaker.

It’s not a pretty picture.

Never in more than a dozen ABC/Post polls from 1995 to 1998 did Gingrich’s approval rating exceed his disapproval. He never saw better than 41 percent approval (Nancy Pelosi’s been 13 points higher), while going as high as 65 percent disapproval during the unpopular government shutdown in a fall 1995 budget battle with Bill Clinton.

Sixty-four percent opposed Gingrich’s re-election as speaker in January 1997. And when he announced in November 1998 that he was stepping down, 70 percent approved.

He was broadly seen as divisive: In 1998 data, 63 percent said he’d tried harder to work against the Democrats in Congress than to work with them. Ninety percent said his successor should try harder to be more cooperative with the then-opposition party. And 82 percent opposed his running for president in 2000.

Gingrich was personally as well as professionally unpopular. More Americans viewed him unfavorably than favorably in every ABC/Post poll in which we asked the question from 1995 through 1998. His final rating in November 1998 was 58 percent unfavorable.

At the time of his 1997 House reprimand in a fundraising inquiry, two-thirds thought he’d broken the law, six in 10 thought he’d tried to mislead the Ethics Committee and 62 percent said he was not honest and trustworthy. Earlier, in 1995, six in 10 said he did not represent the views of most Americans, and more, 66 percent, said he lacked the personality and temperament to serve as president.

Most did see Gingrich as an effective House speaker – in late 1998, 56 percent said he’d been successful in the job – and he wasn’t seen as any more dishonest than most politicians in Washington. But, in sum, he was far from a popular political figure.

And now? In our most recent ABC/Post poll Gingrich has five percent support for the Republican nomination, down from a high of 15 percent in February.

September 28, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

The Use and Misuse of Polls

September 24, 2007 10:02 AM

I made the following comments last week (Sept. 20) at the annual conference of the World Association for Public Opinion Research in Berlin – in part commenting on a keynote address by the sociologist Kurt Lang, and also reflecting on my own approach to the work we do. The session was entitled "The Use and Misuse of Polls in Politics and the Media."

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The day before yesterday I got the following message on my BlackBerry: "Two simultaneous car bombs outside the health ministry in central Baghdad killed seven people and wounded 23 on Tuesday. There was also another car bomb attack near Sadr City in Baghdad; eight people were killed and 22 wounded. Three earlier car bombs killed a total of nine people and wounded 28."

A day previous I received a rundown of available video shots from that day's violence: "#052: Shows Baghdad's Jamila district – U.S. troops and Iraqi police at the site. Close up of wreckage of car. Grieving men hugging each other and crying.”

"#040: Shows wide shot of the bombing site. Remains of the car bomb. Man is shouting at his friends, 'Here comes the Americans, be aware 'cause they shoot randomly.'"

Receiving these messages over the last two days did not put me in an ideal frame of mind to hear Kurt Lang's keynote address at this conference on what polls cannot tell us about public opinion. Having just completed our fourth national public opinion poll in Iraq, I am far more focused at the moment on the essential nature of what polls can tell us about public opinion, often in a unique and irreplaceable way.

Let's take the case of Iraq. If we want to know what's occurring there – the living conditions, the extent of the violence punctuating daily life, the attitudes that spring up from these experiences, the implications for our place and policy in Iraq – there is nothing more fundamental than for us to go to a random, representative national sample of Iraqis and ask them. And then to independently and accurately report their answers.

I've had many a grizzled newsman waggle a finger at me and intone, "Polls are no substitute for good reporting." They're right, but for the wrong reason. Good polling is good reporting. You hear talk of "polls and pundits" when in reality good polling is anti-pundit. A good poll, honestly done, chases away the spin and speculation that exist and even thrive unchallenged in its absence.

Kurt's concern as I heard it is that public opinion as expressed in polls is substantively inadequate to direct public policy. That seems in his view to represent a fundamental flaw since he describes the effect of polls on policy as "the ultimate payoff from polling."

I don't see that as our purpose. Indeed to portray our efforts to know and understand public opinion as an enterprise whose ultimate aim is to impose majoritarian rule on our elected officials is to draw an exaggerated caricature. It's a good straw man to help support the point that we need to be mindful as well of other, anecdotal, expressions of public sentiment. I'm OK with that. Public opinion polls don’t end the debate on any subject. Salience matters. Expertise matters. Available options, political realities, economic constraints – all these and many more frame policy choices. But I'd hope we'd never argue that public opinion deserves anything less than a full setting at the table.

Our real aim, like any reporter's, is to cover our beat, fully and well. Covering the beat of public opinon enables us to give voice to those who lack it, to assess conditions and attitudes independently, and to inform our judgment across a range of issues with valid, reliable data. This is what we bring to the table with our polling in places like Iraq and Afghanistan – and every bit as much with our polling at home in the United States.

But here's where life gets tricky. I've been talking about good polling – good data. It lends authority. Substance. It elevates our reporting above mere anecdote into the realm of empiricism. Numbers carry a weight – a heft – that I personally suspect is no less than biblical in origin. You know the phrase the "writing on the wall?" Anyone remember what it said?

"Mene, mene, tekel, uparsin" – "numbered, numbered, weighed and divided" – "Numbered, the Lord has numbered your kingdom and come to its end; weighed, the Lord has weighed your kingdom and found it wanting; divided, the Lord has divided your kingdom and parceled it out." So ended the days of Belshazzar, grandson of Nebuchadnezzar, in Babylon – as it happens, in today's Iraq.

If such is the clout of numbers – we have to be damned careful with them.

News organizations, in particular, for far too long have indulged themselves in the lazy luxury of being both data hungry and math phobic. It is unacceptable – more than ever these days, when we swim in a sea of what I call manufactured data, produced not to portray public opinion independently and accurately but to promote a product, a policy or a point of view. Data cooked up on the cheap – often via the internet – to grab a quick headline, to please a paying client, perhaps innocently to misinform, perhaps actively to disinform.

At ABC News we try like hell to produce good research. But we burn just as many calories trying to kill bad research.

Years ago, with the support of management, we set up a polling standards and vetting operation. First we developed fair-minded but rigorous standards for what survey research we will and will not report. And then a procedure by which any survey being considered for air at ABC News goes through my unit first – or is supposed to – for a review in which we check it out, and either clear it for air or kick it out the back door.

It's the same as what reporters are supposed to with any other alleged news that comes in over the transom – we verify it before we report it, because that's our job. And doing our job protects our credibility. And our credibility is our stock in trade.

I've been on this little crusade for a decade now and it's gradually getting traction, because if there's nothing a reporter loves more than a good story, there's nothing a reporter hates more than being wrong. Except perhaps getting used. Purveyors of manufactured or just shoddy data use us in ways we must be aware of and protect against.

And so we are. My friends at The Associated Press – where I started my career 27 short years ago – have put in place polling standards and vetting modeled on our own. Last year my counterpart at The New York Times took me to lunch, picked my brain, reviewed our operation – and put in place polling standards and vetting in her newsroom. The new polling director at The Washington Post is my old assistant director at ABC News; I'm thinking he picked up a trick or two along the way.

In the end, Kurt's right – polls are imperfect. He's right – we need a range of intelligent, meaningful inputs to inform our judgment and to help our leaders shape policy. Journalists need – without question – to see that it's not all just numbers, to recognize the difference between good data vs. bad, reliable vs. unreliable, independent vs. manufactured – to make these distinctions and to report accordingly.

But for all that – after a week of military assessments, Congressional testimony, a presidential address, rebuttals from the other side – if you really want to know what's going on in Iraq – you could do worse than going over to ABCnews.com and taking a look at our latest poll there.

September 24, 2007 in Favorite Posts | Permalink | User Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Polling in Iraq: The Unsung Heroes

September 10, 2007 10:00 AM

(I posted the following item on the WorldNewser blog site last March. With our latest Iraq poll just out today, it's again worth celebrating the courageous field workers behind these surveys. Without them our independent understanding of public opinion in Iraq would be impossible.)

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I picked up 130 new heroes this past month. One hundred-thirty men and women who fanned out across Iraq, some in some relatively peaceful areas and others in horribly dangerous ones, armed with nothing more than sheaves of paper, a few pencils and perhaps a sense they were doing important work.

These were the interviewers and field supervisors who produced our national public opinion poll in Iraq. All Iraqis, trained in the principles and practice of survey research, they knocked on more than 3,000 doors in 458 neighborhoods and villages from the Persian Gulf to the Turkish border.

Most of those doors opened. And our interviewers went in, sat down, and asked our questions.

What's your life like here?

Do you think it'll get better in the coming year?

What's the biggest problem? What about the basics -- clean water, electricity, economic opportunity? How much confidence do you have in the government, the police, the army, U.S. forces?

What about violence -- any of that nearby here? Kidnappings, cab bombs, snipers, fighting between armed forces, abuse of civilians? Do you have friends or family who've been hurt? How's it affecting your own life, the things you do, the way you feel?

These and more questions, enough to fill a half-hour interview. Our interviewers took photos when they were permitted to do so, even a little video. They filled out field journals describing their experiences. Most completed their assignments relatively uneventfully. Some were detained by the police. Others witnessed bombings, shootings, kidnappings and beatings -- episodes of the random violence and loss that we now better understand are occurring across Iraq.

Two thousand, two-hundred and twelve interviews later we have our answers. The picture is neither a happy nor a pretty one. But it's compelling and necessary, and there was no other way to get it but through the efforts of these 130 researchers who made it possible for us to tell the story of life in today's Iraq.

September 10, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)