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How Democrats Can Use Polling to Win Elections
From the August/September 2006 issue of Public Opinion Pros magazine. With less than a hundred days until the midterm congressional elections, political consultants on both sides of the aisle are hard at work putting together a strategy for the campaign season. With Democrats eager to take control of Congress, many of the party’s political strategists have suggested that the secret to winning in 2006 may be to be more like the Republicans—that is, to move towards the center in key policy areas. But Democrats can win in 2006 without compromising their principles. The page they need to steal from the Republican playbook is the one that describes how to use polling data. As the Republicans have long recognized, not all voters care about the same issues to the same degree. They have applied this very simple observation in three ways, and it has led them to win countless local, state, and national elections. Using data from the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies (ANES), fielded during the 2004 election season, we can illuminate the ways Republicans use polling data to inform campaign strategy. Here is how the Republican playbook reads: The most important piece of information to learn from a poll is what issues are most important to voters. When Republicans segment voters into groups, they typically use the “most important issue� questions to do it, whereas Democrats typically use demographics, speculating, for instance, on how married women or African Americans will vote and then tailoring their campaign strategies to the various groups. While demographics offer insights into who is thinking what, it is much more useful to be able to identify the single issue that will determine someone’s vote. The most important issue questions can be used to distinguish between issues that are important and those that are vote-deciding. With increasing numbers of voters being pulled in different directions by their views on various issues, this information is critical, and yet the questions needed to make these determinations are often not asked on Democrats’ surveys.
 Those who considered terrorism, taxes, or abortion to be the single most important issue voted for Bush by margins of three to one in the case of terrorism, and two to one in the cases of taxes and abortion. One hundred percent of those who considered immigration to be the single most important issue voted for Bush (although caution is needed in interpreting this finding, since only a small percentage of voters considered this to be the most important issue).
By contrast (though there are, of course, notable exceptions), we rarely see nine to one or three to one margins when analyzing the impact of demographic characteristics on the vote. Thus, segmenting the voters based on their vote-deciding issue provides much more insight into their political behavior than sorting them according to demographics. When trying to persuade independents, only talk about the issues that a sizeable number of voters consider important enough to decide their vote. In 2004, Republican campaigns emphasized terrorism and “moral values.� According to the Michigan data, homeland security was an issue of passing importance to 46 percent of the electorate, and of paramount importance to nearly 11 percent of voters. Using the issues of abortion and gay rights as proxies for “moral values,� we see that more than 20 percent of voters found at least one of those issues of some importance, with nearly one in ten considering it of prime importance. By contrast, in his 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry emphasized three issues besides terrorism: oil, jobs, and health care. Less than 1 percent of voters, however, found oil or gas prices of any importance, and less than one-tenth of 1 percent found the issue paramount. An impressive 13.5 percent of voters considered jobs an important issue, but a mere 2.2 percent considered it of prime importance. A sizeable 12.5 percent of voters considered health care important, but only 3.6 percent considered it a paramount issue. While many voters found jobs and health care important, few found these issues important enough to let them be the deciding factors in their vote. Unfortunately for Democrats, several of their staple issues are ones that most independent voters do not feel passionately enough about to let decide their vote, including health care, welfare, the environment, Social Security, and labor policy. To be sure, a great many consider these issues significant, but only a tiny fraction find them of critical importance. By contrast, the staple Republican issues of defense spending and taxes are considered critical by a much larger group of voters. While these staple Democratic issues may be of little use in persuading swing voters and independents, they could be used to turn out the vote among the Democratic base. Issues like Social Security, for instance, can be vital tools for turning out the vote among Democratic senior citizens. In order to win, the candidate does not need the agreement of the general public on any issue; only people who care fervently about the issue need to agree with the candidate. Consider the following finding: On literally dozens of issues, the Michigan data show that the Republican position is the minority position nationally, but the dominant position among those voters for whom the issue is of prime importance. Take abortion. As shown in Figure 2, a majority of Americans are pro-choice. Voters who find the issue somewhat important are evenly divided between being pro-choice and pro-life. Voters who find abortion deeply important are pro-life by a margin of more than three to one. The same is the case with gun control. The majority of Americans favor restrictions on gun ownership. Voters who find the issue somewhat important are evenly divided on gun control. Voters who find the issue extremely important favor no limitations on gun ownership.  Democrats, however, typically examine the opinions of likely voters as a whole, rather than distinguishing between those who consider the issue of prime importance and everyone else. But in order to win elections, Democrats do not need to shift public opinion writ large on any issue. Instead, they need to win a majority among each issue-based group of voters. To do this, Democrats need to target several issues where they can convert the passively interested into the passionately interested. That is, they need to take voters who agree with them on an issue but find it only mildly important and convert them into voters who let that issue decide their votes. For instance, if Democrats took all those who are pro-choice but find abortion only sort of important and converted them into pro-choice fanatics, they would win the abortion vote every time. The same goes for gun control, health care, Social Security, gay rights, and the environment. In the current political climate, the largest potential gains from this strategy for Democrats accrue if they emphasize the war in Iraq. As mentioned above, in 2004, while nearly one in every two voters considered this issue of at least some importance, only about one in ten considered it important enough to decide their vote. Those voters who let the Iraq issue decide their vote, however, broke for Kerry by a wide margin.  If Democrats could take even half the voters who consider Iraq a significant but not a “vote-deciding� issue and convert them into antiwar zealots, they would win the 2006 midterm elections by a comfortable margin. With an ongoing, bloody insurgency that is costing hundreds of American lives and billions of taxpayer dollars, it is not difficult to imagine this strategy being quite successful. Thus, in order to win elections, Democrats do not need to compromise their principles; they need to change the way they collect and utilize polling data in campaign strategy. Specifically, they need to do three things:
If they follow these three steps, the 2006 election may be the decisive victory for the Democrats that 1994 was for the Republicans. *First published in August 2006, by Public Opinion Pros |
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