governing with the polls: governing with the polls

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G O V E R N I N G W I T H T H E P O L L SA M Y F R I E D A N D D O U G L A S B . H A R R I S

INTRODUCTION

During the 2000 presidential campaign and the early years of his presidency,President George W. Bush purported to be a politician who was not interested inpublic opinion polls. As part of this image-making, Bush presented himself asdifferent from his predecessor, President Bill Clinton, who was known as aconsumer of polling data and was portrayed as unusual in this regard. PresidentBush’s team also meant to evoke an image of Bush as a leader who set out his ownpath to presidential achievement regardless of public sentiment. Yet the Bushadministration used polls quite a bit, developing language to promote its policyagenda.1 For instance, under President George W. Bush, one rhetorical movegenerated by opinion researchers was the refiguring of the estate tax as the “deathtax.” By the same token, the narrative about President Clinton both disregardedcases of him acting contrary to the polls and overlooked the decades-long practiceby previous elected officials to govern with the polls.

In fact, the use of quantitative public opinion data in politics and governmentdates back to the 1930s. During this decade, electoral campaign strategists,administrators in government agencies, and presidential advisors gathered andused information from polls. To be sure, during these early years and beyond,citizens and legislators voiced their suspicion and dislike of polls. However, aspolling for politics, academic analysis, and market research grew over the decades,public opinion studies became increasingly common in government. By the turn ofthe twenty-first century, bureaucrats and politicians in the United States weregoverning with the polls.

Amy Fried is Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean, College of Liberal Artsand Sciences, University of Maine. Among her recent journal articles are, “The Forgotten LindsayRogers and the Development of American Political Science” (American Political Science Review)and “The Personalization of Collective Memory: The Smithsonian’s September 11 Exhibit”(Political Communication).

Douglas B. Harris (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) is Associate Professor of Political Scienceand Assistant Director of the Honors Program at Loyola University Maryland. Along with threecolleagues, he is co-author of The Austin-Boston Connection: Fifty Years of House DemocraticLeadership, published by Texas A&M University Press.

1. Joshua Green,”The Other War Room,” Washington Monthly, April 2002 (available at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0204.green.html, accessed 31 December 2009);Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, “Words vs. Deeds President George W. Bush and Polling,” TheBrookings Review 21, 2003: 32–5.

© 2010 Phi Alpha Theta

This article explores the growth of polling in governance settings and demon-strates that public opinion polls were technological tools crafted to achieveinstitutional goals and incorporated into institutional settings. In doing so, wemake five arguments, primarily supported by evidence from the presidency ofFranklin D. Roosevelt and from the Congresses that gathered in the final decadesof the twentieth century. Our first argument is that while polls have been increas-ingly used in governance settings, they were adopted unevenly, with the presidentand executive branch using them earlier and Congress adopting them later. Fran-klin D. Roosevelt’s administration turned to pollsters decades before George W.Bush’s staff used opinion data to label the estate tax the “death tax.” Developedin the private sector, polls migrated from marketing and advertising to govern-ment agencies and presidents’ offices and then to Congress as networks of pollingprofessionals progressively developed techniques and institutionalized means ofgathering and using opinion data. Quantitative-opinion researchers surveyedopinions to discern respondents’ motivations and psychological states as commer-cial and then political actors sought to understand and influence them.

Second, we argue that the adoption of polls was supported by organizationaland institutional dynamics involving the building of networks and polling appa-rata by skilled and innovative polling pioneers. This explanation complementsrecent prominent accounts of polling’s rise that have stressed cultural aspects toaccount for their diffusion. Not discounting these accounts, we contend thatinstitutional elements were also important and employ concepts from the schoolof thought that has been dubbed new institutionalism to explain these develop-ments. In applying this perspective, we depict early networks composed of mar-keters, the nascent polling industry and academic survey researchers, as well asnetworks in federal bureaucracies. Furthermore, this institutionalist lens focuseson how initial technological developments—in particular, the quantitative turn inopinion measurement—blazed a path followed by others. Individuals in theseearly bureaucratic networks assisted each other in developing polling operationsand used polls to advise President Roosevelt and, via the Department of Agricul-ture and the War Department in the 1930s and 1940s, to plan and carry out policyendeavors. When decades later polling was adopted by congressional leaders,surveying methods were far better established than in the initial period and oncereluctant legislative leaders turned for assistance to professional pollsters with tiesto business, candidates, and political parties.

Third, we contend that the growing use of polls by presidents’ executive officesand administrative agencies was part of a larger pattern contributing to thebuilding of the American state, a project begun in the Progressive era that gained

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momentum during the New Deal and World War II. Gathering data by way ofpolls served a variety of strategic purposes for a burgeoning American state, suchas designing more effective policies, preventing resistance by the public to federalintervention that affected local and traditional practices, and shaping Presidentialrhetoric aimed at persuasion. As the American state became an increasinglypowerful entity across the country and globally, executive branch actors found itworthwhile to use polling data as they planned rhetorical strategies to appeal tothe public through the media of the day.

Fourth, the later adoption of polls by Congress was part of a shift towardplebiscitary politics that, like the rise of administrative politics, had its roots in theProgressive movement.2 In the party-dominated and highly segmented regionalpolitics of the nineteenth century, members of Congress were apt both to considerparty mediation as the proper intermediary that separated them from directpopular sentiment and to be suspicious of nationalizing movements. Congress’slong-standing and implicit institutional norms, developed in this context, under-went a shift after Progressive reforms and an increasingly nationalized politicsweakened political party organizations.3 Although the full measure of the Pro-gressives’ impact would be felt only over time, increasingly throughout the twen-tieth century, members of Congress abandoned these older conceptions of partyallegiance as well as the Burkean notions that legislators were trustees and thatCongress itself was the public voice. Consistent with the new plebiscitary politics,individual members of Congress adopted new practices of polling along with amore democratic view of their representative roles. By the 1970s, deeming thisnew technology both more appropriate and more reliable, Congressional leadersand backbenchers were also drawn toward polls as a weapon in institutionalcombat as they sought to counter Presidents from the opposition party andoperate in a new media environment which readily incorporated rhetoric contes-tation involving stylized, poll-tested talking points.

Fifth, through most of this period, the increased legitimacy of polling madepublic opinion itself more “real” and legitimate and politicians used polls formultiple political purposes, ranging far beyond simply counting how many citi-zens planned on voting for a candidate or supporting certain policies. Actors inthese institutions increasingly viewed public opinion and perceptions of publicopinion as a political resource and were interested in both having citizens on their

2. See Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920, New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

3. See Sidney M. Milkis, Political Parties and Constitutional Government: Remaking AmericanDemocracy, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

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side and being able to convince others (in some cases, with rather strained usesof poll data) that their interpretations of public opinion were correct. Polls wereused in efforts to construct a view of public opinion that would serve politicalpurposes.4 The surveying professionals assisted in creating consequential publicopinion through their crafting of questions and responses. Because every proposalcan be described in many different ways, there is no singular or scientific way ofwording a poll question regarding any particular policy. Moreover, presidentialadvisors, campaign operatives, and political advisors employ polls with split-samples (with different groups of respondents responding to distinctive ways ofdescribing a policy) so that politicians can learn which wording garners popularsupport or opposition.

Over time, the uses and successes of polling were applied to such an extent thatboth White House and Congress (albeit later) came to use them outside of afocused election season and thus saw campaigning as “permanent.” Despiteproclamations about the lack of importance of polls, contemporary politicians inboth branches employ them to forward their policy agendas, shape their publicimages, undermine opponents, and sell their preferred alternatives.

CULTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF

POLLING ENTERPRISES

Before polls were widely used, those who wanted to discern the public will spoketo community leaders, eye-balled citizens at rallies, tallied letters to their officesand the newspaper, conducted straw polls, and listened to representatives fromcitizen groups. Polls present information about people’s views and behaviorsbased on the aggregated responses of a deliberately selected sample of individualswho have picked an option from a small set of possible responses crafted byexperts. But the shift to polls was not a neutral means of gathering the sameinformation. As Benjamin Ginsberg points out, “[p]olls underwrite or subsidizethe costs of eliciting, organizing and publicly expressing opinion,” thereby givingdecreased prominence to views that are passionately and fervently held.5 By thesame token, opinions held by majorities are frequently given more credence thanthose of minorities, however well-informed, consistent, critical to an underlying

4. See Amy Fried, Muffled Echoes: Oliver North and the Politics of Public Opinion, New York:Columbia UP, 1997; Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, Politicians Don’t Pander,Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 2000.

5. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Captive Public, New York: Basic Books, 1986, 64. See also HerbertBlumer, “Public Opinion and Public Opinion Polling,” American Sociological Review 13,1948, 242–9.


world view, or representative of a politically meaningful segment of the citizenry.As Jürgen Habermas argues, since the mass media use polls as the major means ofrepresenting views of the citizenry, they narrow the range of public voices in thepublic sphere.6 Individuals can have more ambivalent and nuanced views thanpolls can capture but these do not become politically and socially consequentialbecause such nuance is not contained in the categories set before respondents. Bycreating response categories and counting and compiling responses to poll ques-tions, polls change what “public opinion” means as well as what the public voiceconveys.

As several accounts of this shift demonstrate, the quantitative turn in publicopinion was in part a cultural and ideological phenomenon. Early proponents ofpolls presented them as scientific and precise means of discerning views. Sarah Igoargues that “[s]cientific surveys were trumpeted as both a sign of, and a routetoward, a modern culture that prized empirical investigation over faith, tradition,approximation, common sense, and guesswork.”7 In a similar vein, Susan Herbstcontends that the purportedly scientific nature of quantitative means of discerningopinions gained currency because it fit with a much longer trend toward ratio-nalization.8 This tendency, famously delineated by Max Weber, involves movingfrom everyday and tradition-bound ways of acting toward rigorous, highlydefined procedures. Narrowing the complexity of existence enhances the power ofelites who employ them to track dynamics and to try to shape developments.Lisbeth Lipari argues that “[p]olls not only derive their legitimacy from theexpectation that they are expressions of public will, they also legitimize the ideathat such a will exists.”9 Igo contends that a cultural concomitant of surveys and

6. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burgerand Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. In our view, Habermas over-stated the extent to which the public sphere was truly accessible to multiple voices before therise of commercial mass media, but continues to provide valuable analysis of the place ofpublic opinion polls in a media-oriented public sphere.

7. Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public,Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2007, 5.

8. Susan Herbst, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics,Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1993.

9. Lisbeth Lipari, “Polling as Ritual, “Journal of Communication 49, 1999, 83–102. See alsoHerbst, Numbered Voices; Justin Lewis, “The Opinion Poll as a Cultural Form,” InternationalJournal of Cultural Studies 2, 1999, 199–221; and John Durham Peters, “The Only ProperScale of Representation: The Politics of Statistics and Stories,” Political Communication 18,2001, 433–49. The very methodology has an impact, as different phrasings of poll questionsinfluence people’s responses. In our internet age, the media solicit and then report on findingsfrom internet polls, a form of surveys that, because people are self-selected, are completelyinvalid means of determining popular views (see Michael L. Kent., Tyler R. Harrison, and


polls was the construction of a new national identity, one framed around the ideaof the average American. For example, Helen and Robert Lynds’ 1929 Middle-town, a study of Muncie, Indiana, which was widely written about, discussed, andread, sought to present this community as not only typical but the exemplar of theAmerican way of life.10 Igo credits multiple factors driving the increasing use ofpolls such as “scientific innovations, accredited experts, statecraft, and com-merce,” but emphasizes “a broad cultural demand, palpable by the early twentiethcentury and generated by a complex of worries about modern industrial society,for new ways of visualizing and making sense of the nation as a whole.”11 To besure, these ideological and cultural currents most certainly contributed to, andwere part of, the rise of polls. Ideas, norms, identity and cultural phenomena areindeed powerful elements of, and contributors to, shifts in the adoption of newtendencies, important in motivating people to build movements, adopt policies,create new structures, and reconstruct political parties and political orders.

However, as scholars of historical institutionalism contend, change entails shiftsin both ideas and institutions.12 Ideas become effective through institutions, whichshape and impart individuals’ goals and organize individuals to plan and implementactivities.13 Furthermore, institutions affect the pace of change. Early steps in a newdirection are often tentative because they are not well-accepted by or incorporated

Maureen Taylor, “A Critique of Internet Polls as Symbolic Representation and Pseudo-Events,” Communication Studies 57, 1996, 299–315). Since there really is not a unified,cohesive “public opinion,” polls’ nature as symbols of “the people” is based in a fundamentalmisreading of the complexity of the citizenry’s views.

10. As Igo points out, Middletown not only overlooked ethnic and racial diversity withinMuncie, but also wrote off the place of new immigrants, so prevalent in large cities, in thenational story (Igo, Average American, 54–60, 82–6). On early market research techniquesthat systematically under-represented women, African-Americans, and working class people,see Daniel Robinson, The Measure of Democracy: Polling, Market Research and Public Life,1939–1945, Toronto: U. of Toronto P., 1999.

11. Igo, Average American, 10.

12. See Robert C. Lieberman, “Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining PoliticalOrder,” American Political Science Review 96, 2002: 697–712; Brian J. Glenn, “The TwoSchools of American Political Development,” Political Studies Review 2, 2004: 153–65;Elizabeth Sanders, “Historical Institutionalism,” in R.A.W. Rhodes, Sarah A. Binder, andBert A. Rockman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, 39–55, Oxford:Oxford UP, 2006; Colin Hay, “Constructivist Institutionalism,” in Rhodes, Binder, andRockman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, 56–74; and ChristopherAnsell, “Network Institutionalism,” in Rhodes, Binder, and Rockman, eds., The OxfordHandbook of Political Institutions, 75–89. Rather than wading in the theoretical thickets,this analysis draws from a variety of institutionalisms, with the exception of rational-choiceinstitutionalism.

13. See Mark Blyth, “Structures Do Not Come With an Instruction Sheet: Interests, Ideas, andProgress in Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics 1, 2003: 695–706.


into institutions. As changes start to take hold, certain dynamics can buttress thosetendencies. Not only do later developments depend on previous ones, an ideacaptured in the phrase “path dependence,” but earlier steps create conditions thatprogressively reinforce them. Certain events and developments may cast the die asit were, creating “critical junctures,” such that a condition becomes a tendency, apredilection, or a seemingly irreversible phenomenon. As Paul Pierson explains,there are “increasing returns,” as “the probability of further steps along the samepath increases with each move down that path” and as the “relative benefits of thecurrent activity compared with other possible options increase over time.”14 Shiftscan take a long time to unfold, but after a certain point, the dynamics of change canbecome self-reinforcing. Additional changes bring with them start-up costs, whichaffect whether and how changes are adopted. Whether or not they remain the bestoption, there is increasing commitment to learning and improving these skills andtools and, thus, to using them with greater frequency and effect.15 Even when atechnology has critical safety flaws, it may prevail for quite awhile, perhaps untilthere is a dramatic failure.16 Existing technologies are promoted by the establish-ment of networks, particularly in sectors that require a good deal of professionaland technical training.

Such general processes of technological change and stasis explain the increasinguse of polls and, perhaps, its likely future staying power. As we discuss below, aweb of relationships tied together poll pioneers, a varied group of institutionalentrepreneurs with a shared desire to promote polling and a common view aboutthe benefits of polls. Ambitious individuals built and grew polling apparatusesin government agencies, universities, and the marketing divisions of businesses,advertising firms, and free-standing operations. Polling leaders shared a commoninterest in building public opinion enterprises and broadening their organizationalcapacities. Polling became more common as it was inscribed into organizationalroutines and repertoires of activities.

14. Paul Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” AmericanPolitical Science Review 94, 2000, 251–267: 252.

15. Take, for the example, the keyboard, with its top row of letters starting with QWERTY.“Why does the QWERTY keyboard, counterintuitive and inefficient, enjoy a monopoly? Theanswer is that even a brief market advantage sometimes makes the lesser choice moreattractive” (Amy Bridges, “Path Dependence, Sequence, History, Theory,” Studies in Ameri-can Political Development 14, 2000. 109–112: 109).

16. Paul Pierson, “The Limits of Design: Explaining Institutional Origins and Change,” Gover-nance 13, 2000, 475–499: 485. The 1986 disaster involving the Space Shuttle Challengerdemonstrates how dramatic failure leads to technological change; analyses of its cause haveconsidered both problems with the shuttle’s design and human factors such as a flaweddecision-making process.


Over time, the creation of a network of skilled individuals enabled officials touse polls in governing. As we have noted, polls were adopted earlier in theexecutive branch than in Congress. This is because, given circumstances definingand surrounding institutions at the time of initial adoption, polling provedunevenly advantageous across institutional settings. Political actors’ interest inpolls is likely to vary in relation to the perception that poll data are useful andappropriate to one’s political context and strategic needs. Thus presidents andbureaucrats, focused on national-level concerns, adopted them well before morelocally-oriented members of Congress.17 Particular institutional adaptations byeither the executive or the legislative branch grew out of the development andlegitimization of polling as an endeavor and an industry, which we discuss below.

POLLING PIONEERS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY

POLLING NETWORKS

Much of the early development of polling methods had its roots in marketing. Inthe early twentieth century, business-oriented organizations developed a series oftechnologies to help them organize their enterprises and sell their products in anincreasingly nationalized market.18 Notably, they did so in concert with academ-ics. The Psychological Corporation, founded in 1921, included psychologistsinvolved in applied research in business and government: “By 1923 almost halfof all American Psychological Association members were shareholders . . . [and]with the creation of a Market Surveys division in 1930 it entered the field ofconsumer research . . . [;] the division established its ‘Psychological Brand Barom-eter,’ which tracked consumers’ references for brand name goods and their aware-ness of advertising slogans.”19

Each of the three major national pollsters of the first half of the twentiethcentury—Crossley, Roper, and Gallup—were institutional entrepreneurs whowere involved in marketing and media audience research. Archibald Crossley“organized [a survey] department for a Philadelphia advertising firm in December

17. Susan Herbst, Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process,Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1998.

18. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of theInformation Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986, 378.

19. Robinson, Measure, 17. See also Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, Berkeley,CA: U. of California P., 1998, 247; and Jean M. Converse, Survey Research in the UnitedStates: Roots and Emergence 1890–1960, Berkeley, CA: U. of California P., 1986, 106–111.


1919 [when merely] a few others were . . . in existence” and founded his ownmarket research firm in 1926.20 The rating system Crossley started in 1930 wasused to measure radio audiences and set advertising rates; it won the Harvardadvertising award for 1930, lasted for sixteen years, and was used in over ahundred and fifty locales.21 Elmo Roper came to polling from the jewelry busi-ness. After being asked by a manufacturer of wedding and engagement rings tohelp figure out why the company’s sales had declined, Roper discovered thatcustomers did not like the old-fashioned style of the rings. Roper began a mar-keting research business in 1934 with Richardson Wood of the J. Walter Thomp-son advertising firm and Paul Cherington of Harvard Business School. Theircompany developed polls on consumers’ attitudes, preferences, and buyinghabits. By 1938 Roper headed his own polling firm and later became a publicfigure with his regular column on public views toward political and businessmatters in Fortune magazine and a weekly Sunday night CBS radio segment.22

But marketing studies remained Roper’s main area of attention and source ofprofits.

George Gallup, whose name became synonymous with opinion polls, was aninstitution builder par excellence. Gallup held a Ph.D. in Applied Psychology and,for his dissertation research, created a method for analyzing newspaper andmagazine readership. After holding several academic positions, Gallup moved intomarketing. In 1932, Gallup began to work in the advertising firm Young andRubicam as vice-president and director of research, a relationship he wouldmaintain in some form or other until 1947. Gallup and Harry Anderson of thePublishers’ Syndicate founded the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1935,a business that polled citizens about their views and candidate preferences andpublished a syndicated newspaper column. Gallup viewed political polling asmuch like commercial work, stating that

You know right down to the last percentage point how good you are. Imean, if you say a book will sell 212,000 copies, the time comes eventually

20. Archibald Crossley, “Early Days of Public Opinion Research,” Public Opinion Quarterly 21,1957, 159–164: 160.

21. Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators, NewYork: William Morrow, 1984; Converse, Survey Research.

22. Interview with Elmo Roper, conducted by Robert O. Carlson, 14 August 1968, Elmo RoperPapers, box 28, folder 1741, Archives & Special Collections of the Thomas J. Dodd ResearchCenter, University of Connecticut Libraries.


when you know exactly how right you are, or how wrong you are. That’strue in the motion picture field. The same is true in politics.23

These three prominent men of polling built relationships with academics asthey were developing survey operations. When Paul Lazarsfeld (who was to foundthe Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University) immigrated to theUnited States, he developed relationships with figures outside of the academy. AsLazarsfeld later explained,

You see, when I came to this country . . . the number of people who did anykind of thinking or working on surveys was extremely small, and everyoneknew everyone. There were only about a dozen people who played any role.We had a very small group which met every month here, in New York, ofwhich Gallup was chairman.24

While investigating the impact of radio on the public with Hadley Cantril ofPrinceton, Lazarsfeld worked with Frank Stanton, the future president of CBS,who was then working as a CBS researcher, developing methodologies for audi-ence research. They created the “program analyzer,” which “enabled CBS to tracksimultaneously the responses of 100 listeners to a specific radio program, gaugingtheir likes and dislikes. CBS used the analyzer for a half-century.”25 Stanton alsointroduced Lazarsfeld to Elmo Roper; as Stanton remembered, “[t]hey bothsmoked cigars, they both liked to drink, they were both very stimulating indi-viduals and they got along very well.”26

23. Reminiscences of George Gallup (1955), p. 10, Columbia University Oral History ResearchOffice Collection (hereafter CUOHROC).

24. Reminiscences of Paul Lazarsfeld (1973), p. 104, CUOHROC.

25. Holcomb B. Noble, “Frank Stanton, Broadcasting Pioneer, Dies at 98,” New York Times, 25December 2006, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/business/media/25cnd-stanton.html, accessed 31 December 2009. On the relationships between Cantril, Lazarsfeld,and Stanton and the link to the relationship between radio networks and social scientists, seeMichael J. Socolow, “Psyche and Society: Radio Advertising and Social Psychology inAmerica, 1923–1936,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24, 2004, 517–34.Socolow argues that Lazarsfeld was “a bridge between the two communities” at a time whenacademic researchers were beginning to have an impact on commercial broadcasters’ mar-keting and programming plans (ibid., 530). Indergeet Parmar places radio audience andother opinion research in the context of foundations’ efforts to shape public opinion onpolicy matters; see I. Parmar, “‘To Relate Knowledge and Action’: The Impact of theRockefeller Foundation on Foreign Policy Thinking During America’s Rise to Globalism1939–1945,” Minerva 40, 2002, 235–63.

26. Reminiscences of Frank Stanton (1991), p. 116, CUOHROC.


Foundations assisted the development of polling institutions and professionalnetworks. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Social Science Research Councilpromoted opinion research through fellowships, committees, and grants. In bring-ing Paul Lazarsfeld from Austria, foundation officers imported a scholar who hadpreviously run an opinion research center. Not only did the foundation fund thePrinceton Radio Research Project, at which Cantril and Lazarsfeld worked, butalso a study on people’s reactions to the War of the Worlds broadcast, the fictionalpresentation about an invasion from Mars that some audience members took asfact. After Cantril and Lazarsfeld went their separate ways, with Lazarsfelddeparting to Columbia University, both of their survey research operations werefunded by the foundation. While market-oriented pollsters were interested inunderstanding why people thought the way they did, academic survey researchersbrought enhanced attention to such matters and developed theoretically groundedmodels of opinion formation, some rooted in social context and others in psy-chological development.27

As the tracking and analysis of consumers and media audiences becameincreasingly sophisticated, public opinion methods were undergoing developmentin politics. Herbert Hoover’s White House tried to discern public opinion byanalyzing newspaper editorials and articles, classifying them by point of view andstate, and compiling summaries.28 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political operationswent beyond looking at journalistic accounts and commentary. Emil Hurja polledfor the Roosevelt campaign in the 1932 election, the 1934 congressional cam-paigns, and the 1936 presidential race.29 Hurja projected voters’ decisions byreweighting demographic groups reported in public polls, focusing on key pre-cincts, and discerning trends among new voters and between rural and urban

27. See Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” inPattricia L. Kendall, ed., The Varied Sociology of Paul F. Lazarsfeld, New York: ColumbiaUP, 1982.

28. A memorandum describing the editorial summaries and the process by which they werecompiled can be found in Brandon Rottinghaus, “Limited to Follow: The Early PublicOpinion Apparatus of the Herbert Hoover White House,” American Politics Research 31,2003, 540–56. See also Robert Eisinger, The Evolution of Presidential Polling, Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 2003.

29. Melvin G. Holli, The Wizard of Washington: Emil Hurja, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Birthof Public Opinion Polling, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002, 68. Eisinger notes that“Hurja was hired to employ his statistical skills to help decide who would receive patronagejobs, undermining the old-fashioned party patronage system . . . Hurja’s survey researchwould locate regions replete with FDR loyalists and would reward them by recommendinga patronage contract or job . . . [w]hereas patronage jobs were once decided locally, the newsystem guaranteed loyalty to FDR through the executive branch” (Eisinger, PresidentialPolling, 83).


voters. Roosevelt’s administration commissioned polls on many different matters,as has every president since. In the growing American state, soundings of opinionbecame another tool for accomplishing political and policy goals.

POLLING IN THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH AND THE GROWTH OF THE

AMERICAN STATE IN THE 1930S AND 1940S

During the New Deal and the Second World War, ideological and institutionalcurrents joined to support the gathering of more reliable information about publicviews. The government was to be a force for solving (or at least mitigating) thepublic’s problems, and solutions, it was believed, should be based on rationalapproaches requiring data. One sort of information deemed necessary involvedcitizens’ behaviors and beliefs. As Daniel Carpenter notes, “[b]ureaucratic statesforecast, plan, gather, and analyze intricate statistical information, and theyexecute complex programs . . . [i]nformational capacity is the power to analyzesocial problems.”30 Thus, within a variety of government agencies, survey opera-tions were created and expanded. With new agencies and endeavors came the needto have data for bureaucrats and policy-makers to plan, implement, and assesspolicies.31 With the advent of war, government officials increasingly became inter-ested in the capacities of the citizen-soldier and the preservation of morale. Stategoals were tied to a growing use of opinion research and those engaged in it werelinked to researchers outside of government. Thus polls and surveys were used inthe expansion of the American state.

With some of the most talented statisticians and developers of public opiniontechniques in America, the Department of Agriculture carried out an array ofsurvey studies. The Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) was established in1922 and became a center of data gathering and analysis as well as the develop-ment of new methodologies:

The first important book to be issued as a byproduct of Federal statisticalactivity was Methods of Correlation Analysis by Mordecai Ezekiel [1930] ofBAE. This book included an exposition of the method of graphic correlation

30. Daniel Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, andPolicy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001, 28.

31. Statistics were collected earlier, including a 1921 effort of Commerce Secretary HerbertHoover to gather data on businesses and unemployment (see Alain Desrosieres, The Politicsof Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, trans. Camille Naish, Cambridge MA:Harvard UP, 1998, 209). The 1924 creation of the Statistical Laboratory (with leadership bylater Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President Henry Wallace) surveyed farmers on cropyields (Converse, Survey Research, 45).


analysis, which had been worked out by Louis H. Bean, another leadingstatistician in BAE and published in his article in the Journal of the Ameri-can Statistical Association for December 1929.32

These activities were given new impetus by the policy response to the Depres-sion. Approximately one out of four Americans lived on farms and the agricul-tural sector had struggled during the 1920s. With the dustbowl and larger collapseof the American economy, farm families suffered greatly. President Franklin D.Roosevelt’s flurry of policies in his first hundred days included the AgriculturalAdjustment Act, a legislative enactment that aimed at limiting food production.To make New Deal policies work, the Agriculture Department needed to developfurther its institutional capacities, including its ability to monitor farm conditionsand farmers’ opinions. Having studied plant genetics at Iowa State College,Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace brought expertise to his position, suchas his business experience as the creator and marketer of a disease-resistant, highyield corn variety and as the publisher of several magazines. Moreover, Wallacehad sophisticated knowledge about the use of quantitative data for assessing andpromoting economic development.33

Agriculture Department officials were concerned with public opinion becausethey believed the key programs of farm subsidies and production controls requiredthe cooperation of farmers. In other words, the state’s goals required knowledgeof the public. As Howard Tolley, a BAE official and Administrator of the Agri-cultural Adjustment Administration from 1936–1938, put it, “The public opinionpoll was a development in the social sciences as important to us in Agriculture asif a chemist had found a new compound like DDT. If it worked for Gallup, whywould it not work for us?”34

Agriculture drew in one of the most influential inventors of attitude measures.Rensis Likert created the attitude scale (still called the Likert scale) which asksrespondents to describe their opinions along a continuum of likes and dislikes.Coming to government service from the insurance industry and later, in 1946,becoming the founding director of the Survey Research Center at the University of

32. Joseph W. Duncan and William C. Shelton, “U.S. Government Contributions to ProbabilitySampling and Statistical Analysis,” Statistical Science 7, 1992, 320–38: 328–9.

33. Oral history interview with Louis Bean, September 11, 1970, p. 6, Harry S. Truman Libraryand Museum, Independence, MO.

34. Interview with Howard Tolley as quoted in Converse, Survey Research, 52. Tolley had beena methodological pioneer who developed correlation methods and outlook studies in theagency (see M.R. Benedict and M.L. Wilson, “Howard Ross Tolley, 1889–1958,” Journal ofFarm Economics 41, 1959, 1–2).


Michigan, Likert began to oversee the Division of Program Surveys at the Depart-ment of Agriculture in 1939, an entity he viewed as a tool to make governmentprograms work better. In one opinion study,35 a survey was conducted around alarge forested area in west central Louisiana where local people had set fires to theforest to try to get Forest Service personnel to leave. After learning that the ForestService was seen as illegitimate because it had fenced grazing land, thus overlook-ing long-standing, economically necessary land use patterns, and had relied onworkers from outside the region, policies were changed. Furthermore, the stafferwho conducted the survey stayed involved, implementing the new policy locallyand training area rangers and officials.

Within his first year, Likert “argued that farm problems and reactions neededto be seen in the larger context of national and international problems thataffected agriculture, such as national morale.”36 Following the bombing of PearlHarbor and the United States’ entry into war, this group was pressed into actionto work on evaluating opinions on defense and to determine the state of nationalmorale.37 As the war progressed, Likert promoted the development of samp-ling methods, even as Program Surveys transitioned into more defense-relatedwork.38

Prior to Pearl Harbor, polls were at issue in public deliberations about foreignpolicy. In October 1939 isolationist congressman Karl Mundt (R-SD) suggestedthat George Gallup’s findings might be inaccurate. Mundt told Gallup that he had“wondered at the sharp disparity between your findings and the mail received inpractically every congressional office indicating the American public wants theembargo retained.”39 After the March 1941 passage of the Lend-Lease Act, which

35. These events occurred in 1940 (see Rensis Likert, “Opinion Studies and Government Policy,”Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 92, 1948, 341–50: 341–3).

36. Converse, Survey Research, 160.

37. Indeed, interviewers from Program Surveys started interviewing Americans on the veryevening of the Pearl Harbor attack and produced a report on public opinion that wasdelivered to government officials a mere week later (Converse, Survey Research, 160).

38. These included surveys of Americans regarding war bonds and of German and Japanesecivilian populations regarding their reaction to strategic bombing operations. Likert wasawarded a Medal of Honor in 1946 for the Strategic Bombing Surveys (Leslie Kish, “InMemorium: Rensis Likert, 1903–1981,” The American Statistician 36, 1982, 124–5: 124.)Converse classifies Program Surveys as one of the three agencies that were most involved insurvey research during World War II (Converse, Survey Research, 163).

39. Letter from Rep. Karl Mundt to George Gallup, 12 October 1939, Congressional Record,Seventy-Sixth Congress, second session, vol. 85, part 2, Appendix and Index, 286. Gallupoutlined in response his views about wording suggestions and offered “to submit this pointto any committee representing both sides of this issue which you might like to name, and be


allowed the sale or trade of arms to countries the president deemed as critical tothe defense of the nation, Senator Gerald Nye (R-ND) voiced concern that pollsmight be skewed to misrepresent Americans’ views of security matters and mightbe unduly influencing public debate and action. Nye introduced a resolution toinvestigate polls and a bill to require that polling firms report data about thenumber and composition of their sample and preserve their materials for twoyears. Nye voiced his suspicion particularly of George Gallup’s firm, saying,“among those taking the polls throughout the country are men and women whoare not bothering to feel the public pulse in their communities, but are dispatchingto the Institute of Public Opinion a response only of the opinion and the wish ofthe one taking the poll.”40

In fact, “[b]oth Roosevelt and the isolationists followed public opinion pollsclosely, both filtered their evaluations of polls through their own hopes andobservations, and both emphasized those findings that reinforced their differentpreferences in the foreign policy debate.”41 Months before Pearl Harbor, HadleyCantril began to send polls to President Roosevelt. In a telegraph asking for ameeting with the president’s administrative assistant, James Rowe, Cantril noted,“[f]or several months have been studying effects of war on American publicopinion with Rockefeller Grant using Gallup poll machinery . . . [h]ave just com-pleted interim analysis which should be of some interest and use in properhands.”42 Cantril then passed along “America Faces the War,” the second of thesepoll reports, in July 1940.43 Soon afterwards Cantril offered to include a pollquestion about “sending food to France under certain contingencies” and askedRowe to “let me know if there is any way at all in which our study may be of useto you or others dealing with the problems, actual or potential, created by the

guided by its decision” (undated letter from George Gallup to Rep. Karl Mundt, no date, 25October 1939, ibid., 503). Mundt did not accept Gallup’s offer to submit poll questions toa committee, stating that it was “too late to define a new question and conduct interviews onit in time to be of any value to this body in making its decision on the question of repealingthe arms embargo” (25 October 1939, ibid., 502).

40. Remarks of Senator Nye, 9 May 1941, Congressional Record, Seventy-Seventh Congress,first session, vol. 87, part 4, p. 3840.

41. Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–1945, Lincoln, NE: U. of Nebraska P.,1983, 479.

42. Telegraph from Hadley Cantril to James Rowe, 22 July 1940, Folder: Princeton OpinionPoll; Papers of James Rowe, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York (fromhere: Rowe Papers).

43. Reply from Rowe to Cantril, 24 July 1940, agreeing to a meeting; Folder: Princeton OpinionPoll; Rowe Papers. See also “America Faces the War,” 22 July 1940, Princeton OpinionResearch Project; Folder: Princeton Opinion Poll; Rowe Papers.


war.”44 On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Cantril sent the president’s office a pollindicating that 51% of Americans thought “the United States would go to waragainst Japan some time in the near future” (with 22% holding no opinion and27% disagreeing).45 Indeed, Cantril was to provide polls and trend charts throughthe war, as well as memos offering wording suggestions for presidential speechesthat included “simple bar graphs and charts based on public opinion polls.”46

Two agencies performed the bulk of survey work focused on the war effort: theResearch Branch of the Division of Morale, U.S. Army (headed by SamuelStouffer), and the Surveys Division of the Office of War Information (headed byElmo Wilson). Stouffer came to the Research Branch from his faculty position atthe University of Chicago and with a high level of survey research experience,including thirteen studies about social responses to the Depression. Part of “a vastwartime migration into governmental work,” Wilson worked for Roper’s pollingoperation before entering government service in 1942.47

While the Army had included a Morale Branch that conducted some surveys,these efforts intensified as the organizational structure shifted. In 1941, ArmyChief of Staff George Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimson oversaw thereorganization of the War Department, creating the Special Services Division, anentity focused on morale that included the Army Research Branch.48 AlthoughStimson banned surveys of military personnel in May 1941, the policy was shiftedto allow polls.49 Leading Special Services was Frederick Osborn, “a businessman,foundation executive, and a friend of both President Roosevelt and Secretary of

44. Letter from Hadley Cantril to James Rowe, July 29, 1940; Folder: Princeton Opinion Poll;Rowe Papers.

45. Trial Tabulations on the Far Eastern situation that just came in from Hadley Cantril,December 5, 1941; Folder: Public Opinion Polls: 1935–1941; President’s Secretary’s File,Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.

46. Hadley Cantril, The Human Dimension: Experiences in Policy Research, New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers UP, 1967, 39, 55–56. See also Richard W. Steele, “The Pulse of the People:Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Gauging of American Public Opinion,” Journal of Contem-porary History 9, 1974, 195–216; Richard W. Steele, Propaganda in an Open Society, TheRoosevelt Administration and the Media, 1933–1941, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,1985.

47. Converse, Survey Research, 162–3.

48. Christopher P. Loss, “The Most Wonderful Thing Has Happened to Me in the Army:Psychology, Citizenship, and American Higher Education in World War II,” Journal ofAmerican History 92, 2005: 864–91; Converse, Survey Research.

49. As this policy change was underway, pollster Elmo Roper wrote to General George C.Marshall in 1941 to propose that the military conduct surveys of soldiers. In 1942, Roperurged General Eisenhower to allow polling in Europe (see Converse, Survey Research,165–7).


War” as well as “an accomplished amateur demographer and longtime advocateof using education as a tool for social progress” with experience with and interestin the issue of soldier morale.50 Osborn’s links to social scientists and foundationswere substantial; he recruited Stouffer to direct the Research Branch.

In the still relatively small world of polling and survey research, networks ofrelationships were dense. Lazarsfeld, who had worked with Stouffer on a projectduring the Depression, was a consultant to the Research Branch; other consultantsincluded Rensis Likert of the Department of Agriculture, Hadley Cantril ofPrinceton, Robert Merton of Columbia University, Frederick Mosteller (a youngman with an M.A. in Mathematics who was to become the founding chair ofHarvard’s Department of Statistics), Louis Guttman (a PhD student at the Uni-versity of Minnesota who became an innovative methodologist), and FrankStanton of CBS. Pollsters Gallup and Roper, along with Lazarsfeld, Cantril, andStanton, advised the OWI.

Military and political leaders used information from these studies to promotemilitary effectiveness and to argue for the little things that would make a soldier’slife more enjoyable. For example, the Research Branch found that beer drinkers inthe Army more easily adjusted to military life when compared to those who didnot drink beer. This information was shared with members of Congress who hadattempted to ban beer at military posts and prohibition was averted.51 In manycases, particular studies and findings led to new programs being developed andfielded; further surveys were then used to modify them. After the Research Branchdiscovered that soldiers were more focused and committed when they learnedabout the background and progress of the war, the Army developed orientationprograms as part of initial training as well as education in the field. Finding that“motion pictures aimed at explaining the war effort had a “positive effect” onsoldier adjustment at every education level,” the Army commissioned a series offilms, including Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series and a film intended toshowcase the contributions of African-Americans and to decrease racial tensionscalled The Negro Soldier.52 Soldiers viewed these films, heard lectures, perused

50. John A. Clausen, “The American Soldier and Social Psychology: Introduction,” SocialPsychology Quarterly 47, 1984, 184–5: 184; Loss, “Most Wonderful Thing,” 869. Also seeoral history interview with Frederick Osborn, 10 July 1974, Harry S. Truman Library andMuseum, Independence, MO.

51. Converse, Survey Research, 167.

52. Loss, “Most Wonderful Thing,” 872; Donald Fisher, Fundamental Development of the SocialSciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council,Ann Arbor, MI: U. of Michigan P., 1993, 188.


maps showing battle history, and engaged in discussions and question and answersessions. The Research Branch played a key role in creating broader educationalprograms accessible to those in military service, as survey results had shown thateducated soldiers were better-adjusted, had higher morale, and were more effi-cient. At the level of core education, the Army created literacy crash-courses tobring recruits to fourth grade level or above. Higher education was made availablethrough a correspondence school program started in April 1942.

During the war, polling continued to be used to discern how to promote thePresident’s domestic economic policies. For example, in the fall of 1943, twosurveys were conducted among farmers regarding farm subsidies, testing whichsort of appeal generated the greatest levels of support. Of the three provided torespondents, patriotic appeals oriented toward the national interest were asso-ciated with the greatest support for subsidy policies, with self-interest appealsless effective. The least effective argument focused on the fact that subsidies werenot a new approach. Hadley Cantril sent these studies directly to the WhiteHouse, delivering them to Samuel Rosenman, Special Counsel to the President,whose relationship to President Roosevelt went back to his years in New Yorkpolitics.53

By the end of the Second World War, a network of polling professionals fromdiverse sectors were building polling offices and generating polling acolytes andclients in administrative agencies, the White House, academia, and business. Pollswere being used for multiple purposes, ranging from designing and improvingpolicy to crafting Presidential rhetoric for strategic political purposes. State-building provided an impetus for the increasing use of polls and surveys withinthe executive branch.

Indeed, polling met the needs of presidents and the executive branch quite well,including in its dealings with its institutional partner and rival. Looking todisplace the Congressional dominance and representation that had typifiednineteenth-century American politics, presidents like Theodore Roosevelt andWoodrow Wilson forged a “rhetorical” presidency, employing the “bully pulpit”

53. Letter from Hadley Cantril to Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, 5 November 1943, Folder: PublicOpinion Polls (2), Papers of Oscar Cox, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NewYork. The letter noted that findings were based on two surveys, reports of 25 October 1943,“Nation-Wide Survey of American Farmers in Reference to Administration’s FarmProgram,” and of 5 November 1943, “A Comparison of the Efficiency of Three Explanationsof Farm Subsidies and of Three Appeals Asking for Support,” both labeled ConfidentialReport for Samuel I. Rosenman, prepared by Hadley Cantril, Gerard B. Lambert; Oralhistory interview with Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, 15 October 1968, Harry S. TrumanLibrary and Museum, Independence, MO.


to expand their influence in the separation of powers framework.54 Connecting toconstituencies less through party and more on the basis of direct, personal appeal,most twentieth-century presidents used increasingly nationalized, broadcastmedia technologies to “go public,” reaching over the heads of Congress and partyorganizations directly to the American people.55 Enjoying their newfound role as“tribune” of the people, presidents found polls useful both in their administrativeefforts to bring information and technical expertise to the executive managementof national policies and to secure popular legitimacy for their own leadership andthose policies. Thus these new practices transformed the presidency and theexecutive branch as institutions. The nascent beginnings of presidential rhetoricalleadership at the beginning of the twentieth century accelerated during FranklinRoosevelt’s Presidency and beyond.56 Since the mid-1970s, White House pollsters,often holdovers from increasingly poll-driven presidential campaigns, haveexpanded both their influence and the scope of advice they give to presidents.With the rise of “superpollsters,” contemporary White Houses engaged in apermanent campaign and modern presidents practiced “plebiscitary” leadership.57

The acceptance and use of polls in Congress took more time.

POLLING AND THE EMERGENCE OF PLEBISCITARY

POLITICS IN CONGRESS

The rise of the polling industry meshed well not only with the increased accep-tance of broad national goals and centralized administrative politics, but alsowith the increasingly democratic nature of twentieth-century American politics.Although the progress was indubitably uneven, suffrage and voting rights protec-tions expanded opportunities for electoral participation, while Progressive effortsat ballot reform and direct democracy instruments like initiatives, recall, andreferenda reflected and reinforced norms friendlier to conceptions of direct

54. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987.

55. Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership, fourth ed., Wash-ington, DC: CQ Press, 2006; Theodore J. Lowi, The Personal President, Ithaca, NY: CornellUP, 1985.

56. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, “The Rise of Presidential Polling: The NixonWhite House in Historical Perspective,” Public Opinion Quarterly 59, 1995, 163–95.

57. On the rise of “superpollsters,” see Eisinger, Evolution. On the permanent campaign, seeSidney Blumenthal, The Permanent Campaign, rev. ed., New York: Simon and Schuster,1982; Bruce I. Newman, The Mass Marketing of Politics Democracy in an Age of Manu-factured Images, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999; Diane J. Heith, Polling to Govern: PublicOpinion and Presidential Leadership, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2004. On the “plebiscitarypresidency,” see Lowi, Personal President.


democracy. Polling made the public—or at least a symbol of the public—real inthe sense that national attitudes were measurable and observable for politicalactors across a range of contexts.

Even if polls are considered a useful technology, this technology mustcomport with both the strategies and norms of a given institution in order to beused.58 Firstly, political elites turn to polls only when they believe that pollingwill provide some strategic advantages in their own particular context.59 Buteven if accepted as strategically valuable, some institutional actors are likely toresist new technologies that they deem inappropriate to their conception of theirrole or the overall mission or function of their institution. Polling, like anytechnology, works through—rather than merely on—existing norms and institu-tional arrangements.60 Rather than embrace polling when the technology firstbecame available, Congress resisted. The democratic assumptions implicit inpolling and their particular suitability to a nationalized sense of the public madepolling practices a better fit with the executive branch than the legislativebranch.

Although Congress ultimately adopted the sophisticated polling practices andpublic opinion-informed communications strategies that typify the permanentcampaign, it did so on its own schedule and on its own terms. Indeed, as ourearlier discussion of pre-war foreign policy polls indicates, there was considerablesuspicion of polls within Congress while the practice was taking root in thepresidency and the executive branch. In a survey of members of Congress andpublic administrators in the mid-1940s, Martin Kriesberg found that public

58. On the “normative pillar” of institutionalism, see W. Richard Scott, Institutions and Orga-nizations, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995, 37–40; and James G. March and Johan P. Olsen,Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics, New York: The Free Press,1989.

59. Arguing that “contextual variables” are “crucial” in explaining political elites’ poll use,Herbst observes that “views of public opinion are tied to one’s position in the politicalworld” (Herbst, Reading, 7).

60. This observation that poll use varies by context also has consequences even when studyingCongress alone. Firstly, the congressional context changed dramatically in the second half ofthe twentieth century in ways that have made polling information more relevant, acceptable,and even necessary for some purposes in the new era of Congressional politics. And,secondly, different actors within Congress perceive their context and strategic aims differ-ently, making poll information more relevant and necessary to some members rather thanothers. Minority parties, for example, are more likely to concern themselves with the outsidepolitical environment to the extent that they are excluded from internal decision-making; seeCharles O. Jones, The Minority Party in Congress, Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. And partyleaders have been found to follow polling more closely than rank-and-file members: seeLawrence Jacobs, Eric Lawrence, Robert Shapiro, and Steven S. Smith, “CongressionalLeadership of Public Opinion,” Political Science Quarterly 113, 1998, 21–42.


administrators were considerably more likely than members of Congress to thinkpolls useful and appropriate, attributing “[t]he relative indifference or hostility ofCongressmen to polling” to existing representative norms, the perceived irrel-evance of polls to the Congressman’s strategic context, and a lack of familiaritywith and confidence in polling.61

A substantial number of members of Congress of the 1930s and 1940s adheredto Burkean conceptions of representation which emphasize legislators using judg-ment rather than echoing public opinion. Arguing that “[p]olls are in contradic-tion to representative government,” one midwestern representative told Kriesberg,“[polls] . . . create an impression that is misleading. A poll is supposed to repre-sent the people; the Congressman represents them; he should know what thepeople think.”62 Not only did polling challenge the individual representative’srole, it also represented a threat to Congress’s collective institutional position as“voice of the people.” Prior to the application of survey methods to politics (andfor some time after that), members of Congress held not only to the Burkean viewof the individual legislator’s role but also to the view that, collectively, Congresswas public opinion. Describing this view among legislative leaders in the mid-twentieth century Congress, one political scientist wrote “[i]t was through theattitudes of the members of Congress that the congressional leaders were able tomeasure the views of the public.”63 Although some might criticize this view as amere congressional conceit, the idea that public opinion was revealed (indeed, forsome, it was made real) through the workings of representative institutions had alonger and more distinguished pedigree than any theory underlying sample sur-veys.64 For those who held to these views, pollsters were usurping the legislators’

61. Martin Kriesberg, “What Congressmen and Administrators Think of the Polls,” PublicOpinion Quarterly, Vol. 9, 1945: 333–7. Nearly twice as many administrators as membersof Congress believed that polls were “helpful to the democratic process” (ibid., 335). Andadministrators were nearly four times as likely to believe that the government should“officially” be interested in polls, with only twelve percent of House members agreeing (ibid.,336).

62. Kriesberg, “Congressmen and Administrators,” 336.

63. Alan McAdams, Power and Politics in Labor Legislation, New York: Columbia UP, 1964,123; apparently, Herbert Hoover shared this assessment: see Eisinger, Evolution.

64. David Minar attributes this “conventionalist” view that the opinions of the public areimperfect and must be subjected to “mediating and moderating institutions that will soften”its “impact . . . on public policy” not only to Edmund Burke but also to Aristotle (DavidMinar, “Public Opinion in the Perspective of Political Theory,” Western Political Quarterly13, 1960, 31–44: 40). Of course, this was also embedded in the American founders’understandings that the “enlarge[ment of] the public views” was accomplished “by passingthem through the medium of a chosen body of citizens” and that this “public voice,pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good


roles to measure and represent—and the legislature’s role to give authoritativevoice to—public opinion.65

A related concern was that polling was increasing presidential and admi-nistrative power at the expense of Congress. Presidents who used polls todiscern public attitudes, represent (perhaps misrepresent) them, mold them,and use new media technologies to mobilize public support were at a decidedadvantage over Congress, diffused as it was across states and districts and withmany, often conflicting, voices. In an era in which presidential and admini-strative power were on the rise, fear of concentration of power in the executivebranch led some members of Congress to be suspicious of polling. Using theresources at their disposal, members of Congress investigated both the pollingindustry and presidential administrations as they tried to displace Congress’sfunction as interpreter of the public will.66 Others in Congress did not knowwhat to do. One member who worried that regulation of polls would add to the“compete centralization” of power in Washington and, indeed, in the executivebranch, scoffed at the idea of regulating the polls, “Do you mean: Let ‘HarryHopkins,’ ‘Frankfurter,’ and ‘Tommy the Cork’ tell America how fast she can‘Gallup’?”67

In addition to normative concerns and institutional jealousy, some membersof Congress also mistrusted polling technologies as flawed technologies.68 Manymembers of Congress relied on more traditional, less formal means of measu-ring public opinion including tabulating mail, monitoring newspapers and lettersto the editor, and staying in touch with “opinion surrogates” like cabdriversand train conductors.69 If these less formal methods of gauging public senti-ment suffered, in comparison to sample surveys, from a lack of precision and

than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose” (Federalist #10, inClinton Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers, New York: New American Library, 1961,82).

65. For instance, Columbia University political scientist Lindsay Rogers argued that pollingcould interfere with representatives’ deliberative, institutional roles; see Lindsay Rogers, ThePollsters: Public Opinion, Politics and Democratic Leadership, New York: Knopf, 1949;Amy Fried, “The Forgotten Lindsay Rogers and the Development of American PoliticalScience,” American Political Science Review 100, 2006, 555–61.

66. Eisinger, Evolution.

67. George F. Lewis, Jr., “The Congressmen Look at the Polls,” Public Opinion Quarterly,Vol. 4, 1940, 229–31: 231.

68. Kriesberg, “Congressmen and Administrators,” 337.

69. Herbst, Numbered Voices, 98–108.


representativeness, they nevertheless offered members of Congress less expensiveinsights into the attitudes of the more motivated (and perhaps more informed)elements of their constituencies—who, many believed, were more likely to turnout in an election and to vote with a particular issue in mind.

What is most remarkable is that such informal measures of public opi-nion reigned in Congress for years after the institutionalization of polling in theWhite House. For example, Representative Mike Kirwan (D-OH), who as chair-man of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was the HouseDemocrats’ top campaigner from 1947 to 1970, preferred “instinct” over pollsclaiming that “judgement” [sic]—not “mathematics and probability”—was “stillthe base of successful politics.”70 Kirwan’s traditional views and “complacency,”attributable to the House Democrats’ perennial electoral success, caused theDCCC to be “stuck in something of a time warp” through the 1950s and 1960seven as Republicans were experimenting with new campaign forms, pollingincluded.71

Not only did such informal methods persist into the 1970s, but they weredefended by national legislative party leaders (and older members more generally)as superior to sample surveys in that they gave members of Congress the kinds ofinformation they needed. When Speaker Carl Albert was asked in a televisioninterview, “if the people in the country at large are ready for some radicalmeasures, why is it that the politicians always seem to be behind the people,” hereplied, “[w]ell, I’m not sure that that is true, regardless of what the pollsters say.I am a pretty good pollster myself; I get an awful lot of mail, and I get mail frompeople that are thinking most about these things.”72 On another occasion, Albertdefended his office’s mail counts compared to Gallup and Harris Polls by claimingthat “I hear from people who have pretty solid opinions.”73 Even Albert’s suc-cessor Tip O’Neill, who would later become an innovative congressional com-municator, claimed to prefer informal measures of public opinion over sample

70. As quoted from Mike Kirwan and John M. Redding, How to Succeed in Politics, New York:McFadden Books, 1964, in David Menefee-Libey, The Triumph of Campaign-CenteredPolitics, Washington, DC: CQ Press, 52.

71. Robin Kolodny, Pursuing Majorities: Congressional Campaign Committees in AmericanPolitics, Norman, OK: U. of Oklahoma P., 1998, 110–112; Menefee-Libey, Triumph,119.

72. Transcript of “Washington Straight Talk” 17 March 1975, “Speeches” F14b, Box 21, CarlAlbert Collection, Carl Albert Congressional Research Center, University of Oklahoma (fromhere: Albert Papers).

73. Notes from 3 September 1975 Press Conference, “Speeches” F29, Box 24, Albert Papers.


surveys, “valu[ing] the feelings of the shoemakers and barber more than some ofthe pollsters.”74

These older conceptions would give way, if slowly, to more contemporaryviews that abandoned (indeed, all but forgot) the idea that Congress was publicopinion, that saw the battle for public opinion as essential for competing in theseparation of powers, and that recognized that, if conducted properly, pollsprovided accurate measures of public support. Many political elites, especiallyyounger politicians learned the value and uses of polling through their ownelection campaigns. Campaigns were, in fact, changing. The twentieth centurybegan with a considerably more predictable and stable electoral context: thenational electorate was smaller and more homogeneous; congressional districtswere smaller; partisanship provided strong cues to voters who were less apt tosplit their tickets; and there were strong patterns of non-competition in one-partydominated regions. Generally speaking, politics was organized more by party thanby campaigns, candidates, and mass communications. To be sure, Progressivereforms struck a significant blow to party strength and massively complicated theelectoral context, but the effects of these reforms were slow to emerge and did sounevenly and gradually throughout the first half of the twentieth century. And,just as party organizations and partisan loyalties were in decline, patterns of socialand geographic mobility further complicated the electoral landscape necessitatingnew sources of polling and marketing information necessary to rationalize thenew and increasingly complex electoral environments.75

By the 1960s, although there were still some House members who did not usepolling—believing “intuition and common sense are sufficient”—polling hadbecome an “accepted practice” in all manner of political campaigns by themid-1960s with an “unquestionabl[e]” “trend . . . toward increased use of pro-fessional political polling” as “[y]ounger candidates, in particular, employ pollingin their campaigns, and often they force older incumbents to follow suit.”76

74. 20 January 1978 Folder “Staff Press Briefing, January-May 1978” Press Relations Box 12,and 6 March 1979 Folder “Staff Press Briefing, January-May, 1979” Press Relations Box 10,Thomas P. O’Neill Papers, Special Collections, John J. Burns Library, Boston College; 1970sHouse leaders’ preferences for informal measures of opinion is discussed more extensively inDouglas B. Harris, “House Majority Party Leaders’ Uses of Public Opinion Information,”Congress & the Presidency 32, 2005, 133–55: 135–6.

75. See Menefee-Libey, Triumph, 32–48.

76. Robert King and Martin Schnitzer, “Contemporary Use of Private Political Polling,” PublicOpinion Quarterly 32, 1968, 431–6: 436. King and Schnitzer’s survey revealed that about 85percent of U.S. Senators and fully half of surveyed House members used polls in their 1966campaigns; see ibid., 433–4.


A similar change in new members’ comfort with media politics brought with itsunshine reforms, C-SPAN, more Capitol Hill press secretaries, and a new publicrole for legislative leaders.77 This new generation of members of Congress alsobrought a greater interest in polling and fewer of the normative concerns that hadcharacterized members of earlier eras.78

At the same time, institutional considerations took on a new urgency withRichard Nixon’s 1968 election and a new era of divided party control of gov-ernment. Presidential use of public opinion techniques and media politicsinfused separation of powers conflicts with partisanship and high politicalstakes. Maintaining Congress’s institutional position and autonomy nowrequired competing with presidents for public attention and approval, leadingsome Congressional leaders to seek to fight fire with fire. As early as 1973, forexample, a new poll-directed “issues operation” at the Democratic NationalCommittee made plans “for a regular series of meetings” between pollsters andmembers of Congress “on public attitudes” that would include top pollstersPeter Hart, William Hamilton, Pat Caddell, Frank Kraft, Roger Seasonwein,and, possibly, Oliver Quayle.79 Even the old-guard Congressional leaders, sus-picious of polls, were not immune to the rise of polling. In fact, Carl Albert andTip O’Neill benefited from occasional briefings by the Kennedy pollster LouHarris (among many others), private polling shared with them by friendly inter-est groups, and insights from the party polling conducted with greater frequencyin the campaign committees.

Increasingly, polling was not only used for electoral purposes, but was alsobecoming a component of the inter-branch fight for control of the policyagenda. Based on polls that “showed that the President had very low ratingswith respect to Watergate, inflation, and the energy crisis,” and “that Demo-crats had significant positive ratings among voters with respect to social issues,”the joint House and Senate Democratic leadership (along with DNC Chairman

77. Timothy E. Cook, Making Laws & Making News, Washington, DC: Brookings InstitutionPress, 1989; Douglas B. Harris, “The Rise of the Public Speakership,” Political ScienceQuarterly 113, 1998, 193–212.

78. In the presidential context, Heith points out that “strategists emerged from the campaign andbecame White House leaders” and that “Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, andClinton clearly transferred their campaign polling apparatus to the White House” (Heith,Polling to Govern, 11, 73).

79. John to Jim and Bill Sudow, 23 October 1973, and Paul Lutzker to Jim Mooney, 2 November1973 Folder “93rd Congress: Democratic National Committee: Poll Project, Oct-Nov. 1973,”Box II: 2, Leadership Files, The John Brademas Congressional Papers, Bobst Library, NewYork University (from here: Brademas Papers).


Robert Strauss) decided to “develop a positive Democratic agenda as an alter-native to Nixon/Republican policies” and to promote that agenda in the mediawith “Congressional leaders as a focus.”80 Thus, some of the first steps towarda media role for legislative leaders were poll-inspired. Still, congressionalleaders’ access to (and interest in) polling continued to pale in comparison toboth the White House polling apparatus and the kinds of polling thatfollowed.

The return to unified government during the Carter presidency alleviated someof the urgency congressional Democrats felt. But some younger leaders stilladvocated a more complete embrace of the new techniques of politics. In 1977,John Brademas (D-IN), then-Majority Whip and head of a budding communica-tions operation in the House Democratic leadership, was advising Speaker O’Neillthat the DCCC needed to “finance periodic surveys dealing with the generalattitudes of voters toward the Democratic House and its over-all activities” thatwould provide for Congressional autonomy over poll information; he said thatCongress would then “not have to rely solely on polls from the White House, theDNC or other groups.”81

But it was Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory and subsequent adoption of thepermanent campaign techniques of public opinion and media politics that was theprecipitant cause of a fundamental transformation in congressional party polling.Again younger leaders, most notably DCCC Chairman Tony Coelho (D-CA),helped to convince Speaker O’Neill that congressional Democrats could no longerafford to ignore media and public opinion politics. As the context changed, sotoo did O’Neill’s attitudes toward polling. Having largely eschewed polling asirrelevant and inferior to more traditional means of gauging public sentimentas late as the 1970s,82 congressional Democrats relied on briefings, reports,and strategy memoranda from, among others, presidential pollsters Lou Harrisand Pat Caddell, who had advised Presidents Kennedy and Carter respectively.Coordinating with then-Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd (D-WV), SpeakerTip O’Neill and the House Democratic leadership used polling information torespond to the Reagan White House and to guide legislative strategy and test

80. “Notes on Brademas-Keefe-Dutton Meeting,” 13 March 1974, Folder “94th Congress:Democratic Agenda, 1974”, Leadership Files, Box II: 03, Brademas Papers.

81. John Brademas to Tip O’Neill, 16 February 1977, Folder “Correspondence with Colleagues,1977,” Staff Files- Eleanor Kelley Box 2, Thomas P. O’Neill Papers, Special Collections, JohnJ. Burns Library, Boston College (from here: O’Neill Papers).

82. Harris, “House Majority,” 136.


media messages with an eye toward building the party’s image in the 1982elections.83

Following Democratic successes in the 1982 elections, polling and publicrelations entities were expanded and eventually institutionalized in congressionalparty politics. O’Neill’s successors—Speakers Jim Wright and Tom Foley—continued to expand the majority party’s use of polling and focus groupsfor gauging public sentiment. Most notably, Representative Newt Gingrich(R-GA) made sophisticated use of polling to craft media and campaign messagesin his quest to build a House Republican majority. As Minority Whip, in addi-tion to more traditional internal whip duties, Gingrich organized a special“strategy whip” group; among its duties, this organization hoped to “establishcontacts and meet with Republican pollsters, think tanks, focus groups” inoverall efforts to “create and communicate broad themes” to the public aboutHouse Republicans.84

Although Gingrich engaged in these efforts throughout the 1980s,85 theyreached a crescendo during Clinton’s presidency. An April 1994 “ProgressReport” of a leadership message group demonstrates the continued presence ofpolling as Republicans built the campaign to win the House majority. Buildingon principles that had been honed at an annual retreat in Salisbury, Maryland,Republican leaders looked to test, hone, and market the party brand. Assessingthe current environment, they asked, “So what are our message weaknesses (perpollsters)? . . . What are Clinton/Democrat message weaknesses? (per pollsters),”and planned to change public sentiment (including “chang[ing] the image of

83. See, for example, notes on poll briefings of 19 October 1981 and 27 January 1982, Folder“Democratic Leadership Campaign Meetings,” Party Leadership and Administrative FilesBox 29, O’Neill Papers; Hart and Associates, “A Report on a Focus Group DiscussionSession Conducted in Portland, Oregon,” October 1981, O’Donnell Files Box 12, O’NeillPapers; Vic Fingerhut to Congress Leaders, “Subject: What Democrats Should Do Tonight,Tomorrow, the Day After, and Next Week in Response to the President’s Speech and theGOP PR Follow-Up,” 24 September 1981, Folder “Democratic Response to the State ofthe Union Address, December 1983–January 1984” Press Relations Box 18, O’NeillPapers.

84. The Whip Organization for Strategy Development, Folder “Whip Organization: ‘Stayingahead of the curve’ ” Box 1063, The Papers of Representative Newt Gingrich, SpecialCollections, University of West Georgia (from here: Gingrich Papers).

85. These were employed in the ultimately successful strategies aimed at gaining Republicancontrol of the House of Repreentatives. See Amy Fried and Douglas B. Harris, “On RedCapes and Charging Bulls: How and Why Conservative Politicians and Interest GroupsPromoted Public Anger,” in John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, eds., What is it AboutGovernment that Americans Dislike?, 157–74, New York: Cambridge UP.


the GOP”), they “formulated . . . messages to test” for possible use in the 1994campaign.86 Similar tactics were employed in the development and marketing ofthe 1994 “Contract with America,” dominated as it was by poll-tested andfocus-grouped legislative proposals such as the “Taking Back Our Streets Act”and “The American Dream Restoration Act.”87 Although he was the mostsophisticated user of polling, Gingrich’s 1994 success and subsequent speaker-ship were but extensions of what had been emerging in Congress and nationalpolitics more generally since the 1970s.

Polling and the permanent campaign—the new plebiscitary politics—transformed Capitol Hill just as it had transformed the White House. Newinstitutional forms were developed to address a host of emerging concernsabout the unstable electoral environment and to develop new strategies toachieve goals in a transformed political context. By the 1990s, both parties wereseeking systematic means of garnering polling information; whereas by the late1980s, Democrats benefited from a “National Polling Project” (described as “acoordinated effort to provide the Democratic Party with ongoing research andanalysis of voter attitudes”), Gingrich’s Republicans sought to establish a “asystematic polling operation” that would “keep the leadership abreast of long-term trends, issues, strategies, etc. that define the overall political environ-ment.”88 And, while there are no “superpollsters” on permanent staff andpervading the Congressional context as they have the White House, top Con-gressional leaders (much more than the rank-and-file89) hold regular meetingswith pollsters and there is a growing phalanx of leadership press secretariesand communications directors conversant with the politics of public opinion(not to mention top party pollsters themselves) for long-range message planningand in their day-to-day workings.90 As one Republican leadership aide put it,

86. Planning & Learning Team’s Market Group Progress Report 26 April 1994, Folder“Planning/Strategy Memos,” Gingrich Papers.

87. See John B. Bader, Taking the Initiative: Leadership Agendas in Congress and the “Contractwith America”, Washington, DC: Georgetown UP, 1996; James G. Gimpel, Legislating theRevolution: The Contract with America and its First 100 Days, Boston, MA: Longman,1996.

88. See National Polling Project, “Overview of Key Findings: A Survey of Voter Attitudes,” June1989, Press Files 1989, Polling Information, Box 417, Cage 655, The Papers of Thomas S.Foley, Special Collections, Washington State University, Pullman, WA; “Structure for Long-Range Planning,” Box 2430, Gingrich Papers.

89. Jacobs, Lawrence, Shapiro, and Smith, “Congressional Leadership.”

90. On the rise of party communicators, see Harris, “Rise of Public Speakership.”


Washington’s “a small community. We all have pollster buddies that we bounceideas off of.”91

Polling information has an increasing currency in contemporary legislativepolitics. As a result, the legislative parties poll frequently, allowing them to discerntrends, measure public reactions to high-profile events, and test the success orfailure of ongoing legislative and message efforts. Moreover, party leadershiporganizations routinely compile and disseminate polling information both forleadership planning and as a service to party members. Leaders and staff increas-ingly cite poll results in party meetings and in conversations with members,especially sharing favorable poll data when trying to persuade members tosupport a particular message effort or bill. As one leadership aide put it,“Members love polls . . . they want to cling to some data.”92

The first and most obvious use of polls is to gather precise information aboutthe public opinion environment that can guide political decisions and activities.Among the most frequent topics of investigation in congressional party polls arethe images of the two parties, questions on the most important problems facingAmerica, presidential image and popularity, occasionally the image and popular-ity of individual congressional leaders (including the other party’s leaders’images), and, more rarely, polling on specific pieces of legislation.93 Heading intothe summer of 1992, for example, Republicans wanted to “[r]eview the realitiesof a world (at home) turned upside down, by examining psychological, demo-graphic and public opinion trends,” which included an effort to “Critique ourassumptions about the value of opinion polling, contrast ‘mere opinion’ with‘public judgment.’ ”94 In the 105th Congress, Speaker Gingrich’s Planning andAdvisory Team sought answers to general questions regarding the party’s currentstanding, such as:

91. These interviews were conducted by Douglas B. Harris under the condition of anonymity:For more examples, see Harris, “Majority Party.”

92. Confidential interview by Douglas B. Harris.

93. Peter Hart and Geoffrey Garin to Democratic Leadership, Democrats for the 1990s “Re:Themes and Strategic Goals for 1990,” 2 January 1990, Folder 7, “Legislative BriefingBooks, House Democratic Communications Meeting [Message Retreat, 1989],” Box 416,The Richard A. Gephardt Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri [from here:Gephardt Papers]. Poll Report to Democratic Members, 8 September 1999, Folder 4, “GOPin Disarray,” Box 838, Gephardt Papers. See, for example, for the monitoringof rival leaders, Folder 10, “Polling on Gingrich Ethics, 1997,” Box 922, Gephardt Papers.

94. Agenda 7/9/92, F “Dear R Colleague Notebook 1992 (3)” Leadership Series Box 15, TheRobert H. Michel Collection, Dirksen Congressional Research Center, Pekin, Illinois.


Where are we now? . . .How are we (House Republicans) perceived? What is our standing with theAmerican public? . . .How do we communicate? . . .What are we trying to say (and what are we actually saying)? . . .What is America actually hearing? . . .Where do we want to be? . . .How do we want to be perceived by America? . . .How do we measure our progress and success?95

By the same token, congressional Democrats heard from a range ofpollsters—including Stan Greenberg, Geoff Garin, Mark Mellman, and CelindaLake—during their 1998 Communications Retreat, which included panel ses-sions on “The 1998 Dynamic,” “The Public Mood,” “The Post Balanced BudgetAgenda,” “Key Audiences,” and “Legislative Battlegrounds”; leadership staffwere briefed later in the year on the public mood and electoral outlook (“thecurrent state of affairs”) and the “issues dynamic” that would frame the Novem-ber elections.96 One part interpreter and one part crystal ball, polls are useful tocontemporary politicians who crave what they believe to be precise informationon the public mood and political climate and who seek to decrease politicaluncertainties.

Still, politicians want more than just “weather reports” about which theycan do little but complain or, at best, prepare for coming storms. Perhaps a betteranalogy is that politicians want “actionable intelligence” about the politicalenvironment that would allow them to confront and manipulate public attitudes.Often they are looking for, as one early 1990s poll report promised, “a winningmessage . . . in this poll.”97 Message development and testing typify congressionalleaders’ efforts to market and sell their legislative products.98 Essential for this use,

95. Notes on Planning and Advisory Team, Notebook “Speaker,” Box 2431, Gingrich Papers.

96. See Rosa DeLauro to Richard Gephardt, “Re: Communications Retreat” 2/6/1998 B841,F12, Gephardt Papers.

97. Greenberg, Lake, Tarrance, and Associates, National Study, Folder “Democratic Agenda”Box 420, Cage 655, The Papers of Thomas S. Foley, Special Collections, Washington StateUniversity, Pullman, WA.

98. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, Politicians Don’t. The marketing basis of pollingfrequently reveals itself in the language employed by congressional leaders who rely onpolling. For example, a 1992 Republican “message meeting” featured a panel on “ReachingKey ‘Customers’ in a Rapidly Shifting Political Marketplace,” which promised “[a] panel ofthree marketing and ad industry people will advise how to ‘market’ the key issues of: Health


polling and focus groups technologies allow congressional leaders to hone partyimages and test competing message frames in efforts to increase public supportfor their legislative proposals and the party as a whole.99 Note, for example,the recommendations of Representatives Vic Fazio and Steny Hoyer, who werecharged by the Democratic leadership with heading up a communications project;they argued “that the effort be organized as a ‘campaign’,” adding:

And like any good campaign, it should begin with research. Our owninstincts and intuitions will not alone carry this campaign to successfulfruition. Research is critical to determine a course of action. . . . We shoulduse qualitative, survey, and any other existing research as the basis on whichto develop our strategy. We need to understand the political realities that wewill face.100

For contemporary congressional leaders, instinct and intuition alone are insuf-ficient for the purposes of comprehending the “political realities” that onlyopinion research can provide.

Despite the increased prevalence of polling on Capitol Hill, most members ofCongress dispute the insinuation that they follow polls, while simultaneouslyexpressing the belief that polls sway their colleagues.101 Indeed, even with polling’swidespread use on both sides of the aisle, evidence of poll use is frequentlydeployed to disparage the opposing party. Putting together talking points forHouse Republicans, leaders wrote, “[de]spite the moderate rhetoric behind theirpoll-driven agenda for the next Congress, the Gephardt-Bonior-Fazio Democratsremain committed to big government.”102 Gephardt’s Democratic Policy Commit-tee made the same observation when Republicans forwarded a prescription drugplan in 2000, encouraging rank and file Democrats, in conversations with mediaand constituents, to label it “poll-driven, not a legislative proposal” and “a

Care, Family values and Jobs/Economics to the key constituencies of women, youth, seniorcitizens, and baby boomers,” 9 June 1992, Folder “Dear R Coll Notebook 1992 (3),”Leadership Files Box 15, The Robert H. Michel Collection, Dirksen Congressional ResearchCenter, Pekin, IL.

99. Douglas B. Harris, “Partisan Framing in Legislative Debates,” in Brian F. Schaffner andPatrick J. Sellers, eds., Winning with Words: The Origins and Impact of Framing, NewYork: Routledge, 2009, 41–59.

100. Fazio and Hoyer to Majority Leader Gephardt, “Re: The Communications Project,” 15June 1993, Box 921, Folder 1, Gephardt Papers.

101. Jacobs, Lawrence, Shapiro, and Smith, “Congressional Leadership.”

102. House Republican Conference “July 4th Recess Packet,” 27 June 1996, Folder “July 4th

Recess,” Box 2263, Gingrich Papers.


poll-driven communications strategy, not an affordable drug plan for America’sseniors.”103

Just as presidents downplay their poll use, congressional politicians often aredefensive about their own poll use and quick to charge their opponents with beingpoll-driven.104 Addressing a House Democratic Communications meeting on thevalue of poll data for “effective communicating,” Richard Gephardt was quick topoint out that “[w]e do not determine policy by poll data or sound bite.”105

Similarly acknowledging the “increased reliance on P.R. types” on Capitol Hill inthe 1980s including his own use of polls, Speaker Jim Wright nevertheless down-played their importance during his speakership, saying that “[t]o some degree wewere influenced by that and we were certainly interested,” but that consultantsand pollsters were tangential to the appropriate job of legislator and legislativeleader: “[They] hone us a good sharp slogan or two, but this is what we’re goingto do. I never asked a political consultant what I should be for.”106 Wrightconcluded that “I would have felt as if I was an impostor if I let a pollster putwords in my mouth.”107 All of this discomfort about poll use on both sides of theaisle seems to confirm that conceptions of appropriateness exist in tension withthe ubiquitous practice of polling for congressional purposes.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Polling was a key technological player in the twentieth-century transformation ofAmerican politics. It contributed to the increased nationalization of Americanpolitics by creating a national market for political ideas and providing the infra-structure for measuring and mobilizing national sentiment. It also meshed withthe shift in twentieth-century American politics toward administrative centraliza-tion and plebiscitary politics. And, although poll use was unevenly adopted acrossinstitutional settings, polling found numerous uses in American national govern-ing institutions. From using surveys to monitor the agricultural economy or troopmorale in order to plan and hone public policy to the more overtly political use ofmonitoring public approval or testing media messages, political leaders found

103. Democratic Policy Committee document, Folder 12 “2 of 2,” Box 838, Gephardt Papers.

104. See Heith, Polling to Govern, 141.

105. “Talking Points: House Democratic Communications Meeting,” Folder 2 “House Demo-cratic Communications Meeting [Message Retreat] 1991,” Box 417, Gephardt Papers.

106. Interview with Speaker Jim Wright by Douglas B. Harris, 28 July 2000.

107. Ibid.


ways to make use of systematic data from surveys and adapted their institutionsand strategies accordingly. A staple of electoral politics and essential to any majorpolitical campaign, polls are now essential and increasingly accepted tools forgoverning in both the executive and legislative branches.

In light of polling’s fledgling early history and crises in confidence afterthe 1936 Literary Digest straw poll debacle and the pollsters’ prediction failure inthe 1948 Truman-Dewey race, the ubiquity of polling in contemporary gover-nance and politics stands as a remarkable achievement of the polling industryand its principal founders. Quite controversial at the outset, polling needed to beimproved, legitimated, and, indeed, “sold” to various actors as reliable, valid,useful for a variety of tasks, and appropriate for republican governance. Polling’sexpansion throughout American politics and society was buttressed by a networkof polling professionals across diverse sectors who defended the practice,improved its methods, and argued on its behalf. Although other institutions andactors intervened, the polling industry helped to transform not only America’spolitical institutions but also its democratic culture. Today, not only is the use ofdata seen as useful and a normal part of politics (though it is not without itsdetractors) in both the governance and political realms of America’s nationalinstitutions, culturally speaking, the term “public opinion” increasingly is used asa synonym for poll results. No matter the criticisms about polls’ problems withaccurately capturing public views and the complaints about how quantitative dataconstruct politically relevant opinion while overlooking other, nascent views inthe public, this technology has gained hegemony as the means of presentingcitizens’ views and serves as a ubiquitous tool for gaining office and governing incontemporary American politics.


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governing with the polls: governing with the polls

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