Bill Reed from the Black Press Foundation

Q:  My name is Bill Reed, and I’m with the Black Press Foundation and associated with the World Media Association.  Basically my question is simple, and I think Ms. Murphy touched on it, and surely Mr. Rasmussen, you can follow up.  Exit polls.  What happened in New Hampshire and the exit polls?  At 9 o’clock CBS can tell you that Steele has won and Martinburg lost, but that’s not actual data, is it?  Could you talk about that?

MR. RASMUSSEN:  Sure.  It is never actual data when they present the results instantly.  What’s happening on the exit polls – and by the way, we don’t do exit polling.  We do do some telephone surveys on election night, but not to project the outcome, to help understand what actually happened.

In an exit poll they go out and they sample people as they’re leaving.  If they are extremely confident that the results will hold, which usually means it’s a landslide, they will announce the results and declare a winner right away.  If that doesn’t happen, the next thing that goes on is you have some very smart people sitting in a room taking results from particular precincts and seeing if they’re matching up with expectations.  In other words, the exit poll said this should be happening here, this is what the turnout should be like, and does it match.

Sometimes, and you saw it in 2004, it became apparent that there was a discrepancy between the original exit polling data and what was actually happening in the states and so they waited much longer.  This is I think one of the worst – or most serious problems facing polling.  Mr. Wattenberg touched on it earlier.  It’s because the news media is racing to be the first one to declare the winner, when in fact once the polls close it doesn’t really matter.  We could even wait 15 minutes and it wouldn’t kill us.  But because there’s a rush, there’s always an edge to report the data before it’s fully confirmed.  Most of the time it doesn’t matter.  To be blunt, on election night this year I would expect I could call 40 of the states, or maybe 45 of the states the night before the election.  So it’s not a question of actually being all that insightful.  But the states that are close, I think it would be good to have a little longer waiting period.

MS. MURPHY:  I was going to add one thing.  I’ve had a chance to be on set at a couple of cable news places on several of these election nights.  To disagree slightly, I do get a sense that producers and certainly the people in front of the camera now make a distinction between getting it first and getting it right.  And even if it’s already been called by another network, they will specifically say, this has been called by another network.  We’re not sure, we’re going to hold off.  I think they were stung so badly by past elections that at least for now people are – some producers and some newsrooms are very reluctant even to be first.  It’s a little scary to be out there first just right now.

And the second point I was going to make about exit polls is what is wonderful the day after the election, or a couple of days after the election, you can go back to the news organizations on their web sites.  They’ll talk about the exit polls.  You can usually link straight into the exit poll and look at what questions were asked and see if that’s really how you would evaluate that information in the same way.

So for example, kind of the headline out of the exit poll is, economy was most important to most voters who voted for X candidate.  If you drill down, sometimes you’ll see that Iraq was important, the war on terror was important.  To me that’s kind of a lump of the same type of concern, but they’re divided out in an exit poll so they don’t get added together, so the economy will, kind of by force of arithmetic, become people’s top concern for a certain candidate.  So I think it’s crucial when you’re consuming the information to really dig in and see if you really – I mean, everyone’s smart enough to go through some numbers, to really see if that’s the information that you draw out of it.  If you draw out the same way the reporters have.  So that was my other point.

MR. WATTENBERG:   I just wanted to say a brief word, the idea of the role of race in this election has come up again and again.  I just wanted to relate a couple of things.  In 1970, Dick Scammon and I wrote a book called The Real Majority.  We tried to explain how elections worked.  It was a best seller.  We got a call one day from Whitney Young, who was then the president of the Urban League.  He had a beautiful suite in the Mayflower and he said, what would you think of a black man running for vice president?  We were very smart.  We said, well, look, blacks vote Democratic anyway, you wouldn’t be doing any good.  Seven reasons.  And then he sort of paused and he said, did I say Democratic? 

Now of course a black on a Republican ticket could move one, two, five, seven percent, or have some blacks stay home, and it would topple like dominoes so many close states.  And the other thing is this.  You see it a little bit with Obama.  Americans are lusting to vote for a moderate black candidate.  You look at the most admired people in America and you see Colin Powell, Condy Rice, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey.  But they will not vote for a Jesse Jackson.

Now Barack Obama is a very, very interesting case because he comes across – he was originally criticized for not being black enough, whatever that means.  And he is a uniter, not a divider.  On the other hand, the Republicans are going to make hay with the idea that he has the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate.  My own thought about Obama is that he has already done – I’m for McCain, by the way, so you know where I am.  He’s an old friend of mine.  I’m for a McCain-Lieberman ticket.  But what Obama has already done for this country by being page one above the fold in every newspaper in the world, leading every newscast in the world, is that a black man can win important elections with a lot of white votes.

Now does that mean that racism is finished in America?  Of course not.  Nobody in his right mind would say that.  Does it mean that we have traversed a huge amount of territory since I worked for President Johnson when those three civil rights bills were passed and the liberal heroes like Sen. William Fulbright voted against them, by the way?  But we have come a long way, and Barack Obama has already made a very important contribution to this nation.

Roddy Jenifer, with the Kingmaker magazine asking a question to Michael Steele.

Q:  My name is Roddy Jenifer, with the Kingmaker magazine.  It’s an educational black history magazine.  And myself, and Mr. Levy Daugherty, who’s seated over there, we’d be glad to talk to anyone about the magazine.  I have a comment and a question.

My comment is, there is a direct correlation between the lack of journalistic integrity and injustice in this country.  I really believe that is true.  I think once true justice comes into being then maybe more people in the news media may be looking for jobs.

As far as justice is concerned in the U.S. Constitution, I’m a direct descendant of one of the signers of the U.S. Constitution.  You can Google, his name is Daniel of St. Thomas Jennifer.  He did not look like me.  And I’m pretty sure that when he was signing the Constitution maybe he wasn’t showing what would be the end result.  But anyway, now I know why I have an affinity with Washington, D.C.

My question is for Ambassador Steele, and I call him Ambassador Steele is I think a few years ago you did a pilgrimage to the Gambia, is that correct?

MR. STEELE:  Sure did.

Q:   My wife is from the Gambia, so even though you’re Republican, you’re still my brother.  One of those things.  (Laughter)

MR. STEELE: Nice to know.

Q:  So my question is, you were on the Joe Madison show maybe a few weeks ago and you were talking about Barack Obama and if he were the Democratic nominee, that it could be a problem for McCain.  Is that correct?  I just want you to maybe comment on that.  And also, why do you think that Barack Obama would not be a good president for this nation at this time?

MR. STEELE:  I’ll start with that one because that’s the easiest.  I just think philosophically he’s on the wrong track, so I’m philosophically opposed to someone who in my view has a rather socialist approach to solving economic problems and some of the social problems that we have, which to the media – well, I think to America’s great  detriment and deficit has not been thoroughly explored.  You look at his voting record in the state legislature, you have to ask yourself why he voted present on so many bills.  And when you peel back and talk to some of the legislators who will talk to you, as I have, you begin to get a picture of greater calculation that has heretofore been exposed by the press.

And I think it will be very interesting to see if he gets the nomination, whether or not people will actually start writing about this man becoming president of the United States.  That’s just my honest view.  The reality of it is, we have a process that in my view has been short-changed because of the aura and then in some cases deification of a presidential candidate, which I don’t think should ever be the case.  I don’t think we should tear these folks down and beat them mercilessly, but I think a fair level of scrutiny is important when you’re talking about a nation at war with a lagging economy and some of the difficulties we have here at home.  You really want an honest assessment of which of these three individuals will be the leader.

As I’ve said at Tavis Smiley’s state of the black union, as I said at the Urban League’s state of black America, and Joe Madison’s show, as an African-American I’m extremely proud of what Barack has done, and I am honored to see him where he is.  And I will do everything in my power this fall to defeat him.  Because for me they are two separate things.  So that to me is kind of where I am on that.

With respect to the first part, the problem for McCain is a systemic problem for the GOP.  And as I’ve said to many of the party leaders, you have no clue how to run against this man.  You have no clue because you had no clue what to do with me.  You had no clue what to do with Kim Blackwell, Lynne Swann, J.C. Watts, and a host of other African-American elected and non-elected leaders in the party.  So what the heck are you going to do up against Barack Obama?  Who has been able to, as you’ve noticed, galvanize and has a lot of momentum and juice behind him.  How do you begin to clearly delineate without falling into the trap of everything you’re saying being pegged or denoted as racist? 

As I said to one of Hillary Clinton’s chief people, go back and tell Hillary now she knows what it’s like to be a black Republican because what they’re doing to her is what I’ve gone through for the last 30 years.  And it’s happening within her own rank and file.

So there’s a very interesting dynamic, and how the race card is being played by both Barack’s team and Hillary’s team.  The press will lead you to believe that it’s only Hillary’s folks out there doing that.  Trust me.  You go back and you look at the course of certain events, you see that this has been a two-way street.

So I think from McCain’s perspective, as I’ve told them, there’s got to be a level of inoculation that needs to begin immediately, where they inoculate him from those loony, loopy charges because, for example, people in this country don’t even know he has a daughter of color and that his family and she were subject to some horrific racist attitudes and media and political material back in 2000.  So McCain has a unique sensitivity to this as a white candidate for the office of president, running against potentially an African-American.

I think what they need to do is to make sure that he stays on the right side of that line.  He doesn’t need to cross that line; and yes, you’re going to have loony loops out there who are going to get up in his name and say some stupid stuff.  They need to be prepared to stamp that down and to address it.  Also, I think McCain needs to speak very forcefully and very clearly about his vision for this country and where it needs to go, and challenge Barack, if he’s the nominee, on how his view of America and the world squares up with where voters think America is and where it should be. 

MR. STEELE:  I think when you break it down, and we were talking earlier about exit pollings, I’m not a fan of exit polling.  I like suspense.  I just kind of like to turn on the television and watch this thing unfold because particularly if you’ve been in the game and you’ve been an activist, you’ve been out there trying to get someone elected or get an issue on the ballot passed, you don’t want someone, as was the case of my race for the U.S. Senate, at 8:01 to be declared, well, he’s lost.  Next.

You kind of like the anticipation.  You even feel a sense of what the outcome may be.  America I think is kind of tired of the fast food mentality where we get it all in 30 seconds and we move on to something else.  I think we have an opportunity through the media to break that down a little bit more and retreat from this instantaneous response to everything.  Let me digest it a little bit.  Let me understand it a little bit more.  Don’t ask for my immediate reaction to something because what I’m going to give you may not necessarily be where I ultimately wind up when I go home and sit down and talk to my wife, who has a very different view of it than I do.  Or my sons and daughters come to the table with their perspective.  Now I’ve got a better 360 view of this issue that you’ve just asked me my sound bite impression of.

So when you poll me on the subject, I can be a little bit more intellectual and a little bit more thoughtful and give you a better answer that’s more reflective of what I really feel.  So I think that whether it’s in the black community, white community, Hispanic communities in America, there’s this overwhelming sense of inundation that’s out there, that this 24-7 news cycle, as I began this conversation, is overtaking us and is forcing us to be more reactive instead of reflective as a community of people.

The interesting thing about the Barack Obama speech recently was that it did cause folks to step back a moment and reflect.  Now they may have agreed with it or didn’t agree with it, or liked it or not, but they did take a step back, despite there being a push to – well, give us your reaction now, tell us what you think right now, having just heard it three seconds ago.

So I think as Americans begin to say, we want better control over this process and the outcome of this process, I think the better off it’s going to be for all of us, both the media as well as the citizens who are oftentimes polled and asked to regurgitate a thought after only knowing three seconds of an issue.

            MR. STEELE:  I want to thank everybody for the opportunity.  I just want to end it this way.  I think the last little bit of this discussion is a reflection of where America is, and the fact that there are people who have ideas and thoughts that they want to see expressed and shared and appreciated by those who may have a different perspective.  I can appreciate where the reverend’s coming from.  And sir, I can only say that as I sat on the stage in New Orleans a month ago as the only Republican on the panel of 20 people, sitting next to the likes of Dick Gregory, Al Sharpton, Donna Brazile, and so forth, and having an audience of some 7,000 Democrats before me, that I can appreciate where you’re coming from.

            But the point was that my expectation was not to have everyone sound like me, or for me to sound like everyone in the room, but to hear something different and to find some way to connect to it, and to appreciate a different perspective, one that I may not have heard before in my experience, and one that when I shared with them, they may not have heard before. 

MR. MARSHALL:  I think a couple of other panelists want to comment. Scott, and then Ben.

MR. RASMUSSEN:  This question about Barack Obama is a great example of some stories coming out based on polling data that are not really reflective of what the polls show, and this is something that I’m seeing on a daily basis now.  We put out a series of state by state election polls, and today we have one up from Oregon, which shows that Barack Obama is leading John McCain in Oregon and Hillary Clinton is trailing.  There are people that will tally these up and say this proves that Obama is the better general election candidate, or Clinton is a weaker candidate, or some other mix, depending on what states they look at.

The truth is, and I’ve probably written this more hundreds of times than I care to admit and said it in more interviews, but it doesn’t seem to catch.  We know based on polling data and based on history what a campaign against Hillary Clinton will be like.  There were people voting this year who were in nursery school when she first moved into the White House.  There are hardened opinions about this woman.  She is the physical embodiment of a partisan dividing our country, and if she is the Democratic nominee, she will get between 46 and 51 percent of the vote, probably not topping 50, and we’d have another close election.

We can tell that because no matter how we frame questions about Senator Clinton, we get the same types of responses, and they are deeply held.  Whether they’re fair or not is a different question, but these opinions about her are deeply held. 

Barack Obama – and by the way, John McCain as well – are not nearly that well known.  Opinions about them are not nearly as well established, and you see it when a news story breaks about either of them, their numbers change.  Hillary Clinton’s numbers never change.  I could have – in 2007 I could have put the name of anybody in this room in a polling question against Hillary Clinton and you would have gotten 40 percent of the vote because people are that committed to voting against her.

And the point is, what the polls are truly saying is, an election involving Barack Obama is unpredictable at this point in time because we don’t know how he will be defined, how the campaign will be defined as it unfolds.  If Hillary Clinton will be the nominee, we do have a good sense of it.  But that’s not what’s coming out.  They’re taking horse race poll numbers, adding them up and saying, my candidate’s better than yours.  In that case it is not the poll that’s the mistake.  It is the reporting of it.

MR. WATTENBERG:  What polling is really useful for is – I think the horse race polling and the exit polling is almost useless.  It is, or can be, useful to explain what the real issues are.  My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute and I, Carlin Bowman (ph), who writes a regular column on polling, have been examining this for more years than I care to speculate about.  And let me just give you – and Dick Scammon and I did also – a couple of ideas.  Abortion, pro or con, life or choice, barely makes the top 10.  It is not a big issue.  In an electoral system where one vote can carry 50 electoral votes, one popular vote, anything makes a difference.  Abortion is not a big issue.

Number two is that foreign policy, while it doesn’t always come up on top, is the sleeper issue in American politics for this reason.  Whether you’re for Iraq, against Iraq, but they say this is a man or woman who has America’s best interests at heart, he or she is prepared to do what is necessary.  He or she is responsible.  He or she is the go-to guy or the go-to woman, and that is what Americans want.  They want a certain toughness and foreign policy is the best single indicator of that.  It’s very difficult to prove that through the polls. 

Well, you know, you can look at the Democrats.  When they’ve nominated someone who was perceived to be dovish – Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter the second time – they’ve lost.  When they’ve nominated Democrats who are seen to be hawkish – Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter the first time, Bill Clinton is a little bit of a mixed bag – they win.  So it is – again, I don’t think you can prove it, but you can stipulate it, and I think it’s accurate.

The other issue that I find fascinating is immigration.  McCain almost got drummed out of the party because he and Kennedy got together on what I think was a very sensible bill, and it was going to kill him.  It was murder.  It was terrible and then a couple of months went by and it’s not so terrible any more.  And in fact, when he runs in the general election, I think he’s going to run pretty among Hispanics, which Republicans, except in Florida, don’t normally do, because he has taken a relatively moderate and realistic position on immigration.

Let me just say a word about immigration.  I am very pro-immigration.  My assistant and housekeeper, Iris Hernandez, is here.  Would you stand up for a minute?  Now Iris came to America in the trunk of a car with 15 other people, driven by a coyote across the border.  She was married, she has three children, she is a single mom.  I know her kids and I know them well.  They are wonderful, wonderful Americans.  And all the polling about, and the calculations about immigration say, oh, it’s going to save a dollar, it’s going to cost a dollar, it’s going to cost so much on welfare, so much on crime.  On the other hand, it’s mostly baloney and I’ll tell you why.

Iris’ son is named Rudy.  He is a sophomore at a good high school.  He’s 6’1”, he weighs 210 pounds, he gets very good grades.  He’s fullback on the football team.  I keep telling him that what’s important is to have a sound mind and a sound body and he says, yes, I know that.  And so you’ve got to say, what will Rudy and the tens of millions of sons and daughters of immigrants, what are they going to yield to America?  And you can’t measure it. 

We have regularly taken immigrants and regularly hated each group that comes in – the Jews, the Italians, the Irish.  We had Asian exclusion acts, anti-Jewish stuff, except of course the idea that Albert Einstein came to America turned out to be pretty good.  I don’t think Rudy is going to win a Nobel prize.  I can see him running the overseas operation of a major corporation in any country that speaks Spanish.  I know he’s going to be a patriotic young man, adult, father.  And McCain has sensed this.  The Americans whose ancestors hated, in series, every immigrant group, now say when you poll them, isn’t it wonderful that America is made up of so many people from so many places?  Of course the hate du jour today is Mexicans.  But Mexicans win proportionately.

            The Department of Defense has a lot of good data except on who’s going to win a war.  The Mexican-Americans in combat win proportionally more Congressional Medals of Honor than any other group.  Every poll shows that immigrants are more patriotic than the rest of Americans.  So it’s a pretty good deal.

And the other thing is just in passing, and we can discuss it if you like, I think Hillary is toast.  We’ll find out about that.  (Laughter)

Reinaldo Escobar, editor of Imagen de Washington Magazine.

Q: My name is Reinaldo Escobar. I am editor of, Imagen de Washington Magazine here in Washington. There is no question about the impact of the polls in political process, but the key question will be, if it’s in the right way or the wrong way because people now think more in numbers than in ideas, especially young people. I heard, for example, a few minutes ago that there was a poll about the lobbyist Abramof. My question is, is it a right thing to do a poll about a judicial decision? I would like to know both from a political and ideological point of view. Thank you..

MR. RASMUSSEN:  I will tell you that we tend to poll on topics that are in the news, broadly defined.  We poll every day about economic concerns.  We poll about political issues.  We poll obviously about campaigns.  We have even polled about who would you most like to clone, when cloning was an issue.  So we do have a pretty wide range of things that we poll about.

The restrictions that we place on it are that it can be something that a person would have a reasonable degree of knowledge about because if I have to call and explain the premise of our question to you, your answer depends entirely on what I explain to you.  We tend to stay away from things like Britney Spears’ latest debacle, or something else, that while it may create some interest, there’s really no redeeming value in it.

When we poll about an issue, whether it’s immigration or a judicial issue, we try to ask lots of questions because I don’t believe there is a single fair question.  You can’t define it.  We heard earlier that the exit polls ask about the war on terror and the war in Iraq separately.  That’s because Republicans and Democrats think about them differently.  And when you come up with something like that, you end up with a variety of information that can be used to inform about what people think.  If you do it well, you give a good overall picture.

Mr. Wattenberg has been talking about immigration.  We have data that some people find absolutely contradictory.  Most Americans think that other than national security threats, just about everybody should be welcomed.  At the same time, they were opposed to the Senate bill, but that had more to do with they were mad at Washington, not mad at immigrants. 

But the way you get to this, again – actually, Michael gave a good example of it earlier.  We ask about, would you vote for a woman president, would you vote for an African-American, would your neighbors?  We do the same thing on questions about drug use.  We do the same thing on questions about other things because you have to ask around the topic to get a good picture of it. 

The danger, and we run into this all the time, is that you ask 12 questions, you get a nice picture that’s nuanced of an issue, and Rush Limbaugh picks up one cross-tab and that becomes his story.  Or Air America picks up a different cross-tab in the same poll and it becomes their story, and the numbers take on a life of their own.

Patricia Murphy and Scott Rasmussen discussing an exit poll question.

MS. MURPHY:  I was going to add a quick point.  When I am talking to my readers, when I’m e-mailing back and forth with them, this entire conversation misses the point in that people want to know how their lives will be different if X is the president.  And do you have plans to invade another country?  Is gas going to spike?  Not to predict things, but what are these people’s real plans?  Is there something that we’re all missing here, and polling – an over-reliance on polling data and stories driven by polls is a real disservice to voters, I think.

So when I have interviewed candidates on the trail, my specific question is, how will people’s lives be different when you’re president?  Obviously you’ll get spun, but that’s not even asked very often. 

Polling is so crucial, but it’s also crucial for voters to inform themselves above and beyond these polls and not just listen to one radio commentator and just swallow it whole, move on and make a decision.  Again, that’s why I started my web site, is because I heard a hunger from women in particular to say, I don’t see this as a boxing match.  I just want to know if my kids are going to have pre-K.  And so that’s my frustration from polling.  I get that from my readers and I try and add more information beyond polls because it’s just not enough to make an informed decision.

Ben Wattenberg fielding a question.

MR. WATTENBERG:  I wanted to add one other thing to that constellation of issues.  Perhaps the biggest underlying domestic issue over the last four decades has been crime.  There was again a small wing of the Democratic Party that said law and order is a code word for racism, which is preposterous.  Law and order is a code word for civilization, and everybody knows that.

Very few Democrats were prepared to denounce that.  That’s what created neo-conservatism.  When the academy and press and the politicians in the Democratic Party were afraid to say law and order is a code word for civilization, not a code word for racism, Americans said that this party – you can’t take your dog around the block and bring home the same animal. 

Now the issues are not created by consultants or people, sociologists who do regression analyses.  James Q. Wilson did this famous article, Broken Windows, about how to deal with crime, and it worked.  Giuliani used it, Mike Bloomberg used it, Ed Koch used it.  And he read all the public opinion polls and he saw how important it was.  But he also noted that you could go out on any street corner in any urban area in America and talk to anyone and say what’s your problem, and they’d say, my problem is my mother can’t go out on the street at night or in the day.  And I’ve had muggings.  I had a sister-in-law who was a methadone nurse who was murdered in Philadelphia.  My father was mugged twice, my mother was mugged, and my son was mugged once in New York and once in Washington.  It is pernicious.  And anyone in any party who comes across as soft on law and order is dead meat.

MR. STEELE:  I think when you break it down, we were talking earlier about exit pollings, I’m not a fan of exit polling.  I like suspense.  I just kind of like to turn on the television and watch this thing unfold because particularly if you’ve been in the game and you’ve been an activist, you’ve been out there trying to get someone elected or get an issue on the ballot passed, you don’t want someone, as was the case of my race for the U.S. Senate, at 8:01 to be declared, well, he’s lost.  Next.

And you know, you kind of like the anticipation.  You even feel a sense of what the outcome may be.  America I think is kind of tired of the fast food mentality where we get it all in 30 seconds and we move on to something else.  I think we have an opportunity through the media to sort of break that down a little bit more and retreat from this instantaneous response to everything.  Let me digest it a little bit.  Let me understand it a little bit more.  Don’t ask for my immediate reaction to something because what I’m going to give you may not necessarily be where I ultimately wind up when I go home and sit down and talk to my wife, who has a very different view of it than I do.  Or my sons and daughters come to the table with their perspective.  Now I’ve got a better 360 view of this issue that you’ve just asked me my sound bite impression of.

So when you poll me on the subject, I can be a little bit more intellectual and a little bit more thoughtful and give you a better answer that’s more reflective of what I really feel.  So I think that whether it’s in the black community, white community, Hispanic communities in America, there’s this overwhelming sense of inundation that’s out there, that this 24-7 news cycle, as I began this conversation, is overtaking us and is forcing us to be more reactive instead of reflective as a community of people.

The interesting thing about the Barack Obama speech recently was that it did cause folks to step back a moment and reflect.  Now they may have agreed with it or didn’t agree with it, or liked it or not, but they did take a step back, despite that there was this push to – well, give us your reaction now, tell us what you think right now, having just heard it three seconds ago.

So I think as Americans begin to say, we want a better control on this process and the outcome of this process, I think the better off it’s going to be for all of us, both the media as well as the citizens who are oftentimes polled and asked to regurgitate a thought after only knowing three seconds of an issue.

MR. RASMUSSEN: Michael, on that point I’m going to give a non-political example, but it is precisely what you’re talking about.  We poll every single night, have been doing it for years, about what people think about the U.S. economy.  And the numbers don’t change much from day to day because the economy didn’t change too much from yesterday.  If you look at longer trends, you see something.  Every now and then there will be an event that shapes our perception of the economy.  The most frequent one is employment reports come out once a month from the government.  Most of the time we expect them to be at a certain level, and sometimes they’re really, in recent months and recent years, been really bad and disappointing. 

Economists and news pundits react as if the employment report came out at 8:30, we should have new information about how people are reacting to it by 9:00.  It takes a week to 10 days before the information from the jobs report works its way through our polling data.  There’s a few people, mostly high risk investors, who digest the information instantly.  There’s a few other people who digest it over the weekend.  You can begin to see the trend shift, but it takes a full week to 10 days before the families have had their conversations, before somebody heard about it at the office, before the boss made a comment about it.  And that’s the kind of time it takes before public opinion settles in, even on something that is widely covered.

MR. MARSHALL:  I’d like to ask a very specific question.  I mentioned at the beginning in my introductory remarks that in Taiwan they have a law that polling results cannot be published 10 days before an election.  So I want to ask each of the panelists to say, would that be a good idea in U.S. elections, and why or why not.  I’m not asking if it’s politically feasible, or First Amendment issues.  If it could be done, should it be done, why or why not?  Let’s start with Michael and work down.

MR. STEELE:  Should they prohibit –

MR. MARSHALL:  The publication of poll results about an upcoming election for a week or 10 days or something like that before the election is held.

MR. STEELE:  I don’t think I’m at that point, where you’re going to say you just can’t tell us what others are thinking 10 days before.  I mean, I get what they’re trying to do.  They’re trying to filter out and come, I guess, with a clean process.  My concern is less with when you do it but how you do it.  It’s less if you do it in this day or that day, or immediately after or before.  It’s just making sure that there’s integrity in the process, and that there is an opportunity for reflection on the process and we get away from this – it really becomes a jump-ball mentality on any given issue.  And I’m hoping the trend, that we see it a little bit more in this cycle because this has been a long political cycle, is a little bit more towards stepping back and thinking a little bit about what these candidates are saying and then speaking to the pollsters and giving them a better assessment.

But I would not go to the point of saying no, you can’t print poll results within a 10-day window of an election.

MR. RASMUSSEN:  I have to give my parochial answer first.  We make our money by having people come to our web site, and the biggest single day of traffic is the day before an election, so absolutely not, it should not be prohibited. 

And the reality is, if you tried to prohibit publishing, what you do is you’d have all of these pundits on the network news who saw the poll results trying to come as close to saying the results without giving numbers as they possibly could.  I think it is a healthy thing to have the numbers out there, along with lots of other stories.

Ultimately people are faced on a few big fundamental questions.  Patricia mentioned what would my life be like if you’re the next president.  But there is something that drives an election, and it’s not going to be swung in the end by a pre-election poll.

MS. MURPHY:  Well, because I used to work in the Senate, my immediate reaction is to have a pilot project and see if it would change anything in an election.  Because I think it’s undeniable that people who perceive a candidate to be weak are perhaps less likely to vote for them.  There are people who are kind of going to take an Alamo approach and say, I’m going to vote for him, I don’t care.  But I think if people think that their vote is wasted on a candidate because of polling going into it, they are less likely to vote for them. I think that’s a great disservice to candidates who are perhaps not as well funded, or candidates who may be new to the process and aren’t kind of hitting the media in a way that they could be.  So I would propose a pilot project and see how it goes.  Then take the results and go from there.

MR. RASMUSSEN:  We’ll do a poll on it.

MS. MURPHY:  We’ll compare polling before and after. 

MR. MARSHALL:  Perhaps a commission –  (Laughter)

MS. MURPHY:  I do need a blue ribbon panel.

MR. WATTENBERG:  Look, we are all in the media business.  That is an abridgement of free speech to say you can’t ask questions of people.

MR. MARSHALL:  Leaving aside those issues, if it could be done, would it be a good idea to do it, or if not, why not?

MR. WATTENBERG:  It would be a terrible idea because it is – I mean, you can’t divorce what it means for the country with – yes, it might be a good idea just in vacuo, but it would mean that the government has a right to restrict free speech, and no one in the journalistic profession is going to go along with that, or in the polling profession.  You’re just not going to do it.  It doesn’t work.

And Scott, I just want to tell you.  I know you were very big in high tech and all the stuff you do.  Something like this, this is our think tank hat.

MR. MARSHALL:  Are they on sale?

MR. WATTENBERG:  If you send me an e-mail and you’re real nice to me, you might get one in the mail back.

MR. MARSHALL:  We’ve got three more questioners.  If we could take those three questions and then we’ll wrap it up.

Q:  My name is Jim Parrish, and I guess I’m here as a Ron Paul supporter.  My reaction to this panel, Mr. Wattenberg, a foolish consistency is a hobgoblin of little minds, but when you advocate law and order and then you talk about breaking the law to come into this country, it’s kind of inconsistent.  I am also pro-immigrant.  I think everybody that’s here should stay here, but I think you have to have a basic groundwork for people to come and be in this country.

The other thing I really sincerely hope you’re wrong about the war issue, and that we need to have another tough guy as president because we’ve had eight years of that, and frankly I think it’s been a disaster.

MR. MARSHALL:  Can we get Ben to respond to that?

Q:  I have one more issue with Mr. Wattenberg.  The law and order issue.  To me personally the law and order issue is that there are 1 million American citizens behind bars in this country.  There’s something wrong with that.

MR. WATTENBERG:  Well, first of all, I appreciate your sentiments about illegal immigration.  I think they’d be much more valuable if you could suggest a remedy.  You could build a wall 100 feet high with tunnels, with spikes 100 feet deep, and you couldn’t stop it.  The Pat Buchanan idea of building fences – look, we take in 80 million tourists a year.  We cannot stop drugs from coming in this country.  I don’t much like illegals, although I must say most of them are upwardly mobile.  The idea that Pat Buchanan is vigorously and viciously against people who are Catholic, patriotic, family-oriented, and inclined to serve their country in the military and intensely patriotic strikes me as a little loco, to use a Spanish phrase.

So if you can come up with a way to do it, I’m prepared to listen.  I have not seen any realistic way.  The only realistic way that came up was voted down by people who allegedly opposed illegal immigration, and that was to put in employer sanctions that had teeth.  I know people who employ illegals, and they say, oh, well, if I get caught, it will cost me $10,000.  If they were going to go to jail for a year, they would be much tougher.  People of your general persuasion, as I understand it, say, no, that’s not a good idea.  That’s the one thing that might work.

About crime and a million people in jail.  It’s a very tough situation, but it has led directly to the diminishment of violent crime.  A thug in jail cannot mug your sister.  That is about as simple a formulation as you can put it.

            And about Iraq, I just wish I knew as much as you do about it.  You know, it took 20 years for the Brits to stabilize Malaysia.  It took 20 years for Salvador to reach some kind of a democratic governance.  If you can tell me what Iraq is going to look like in 10 years, I salute you.  You’ve got to remember, every American serving over there has been a volunteer.  It’s not like Vietnam.  They have an elected president, they have a court, they have a relatively free press.  I don’t know where it’s going.  It looked pretty good, it looked terrible, it looked pretty good.  I think McCain is now picking up on it.

I happen to believe that when the history of this time is written, the greatest thing that America will have accomplished is the promotion and promulgation of democratic views and values around the world.  Freedom House takes a poll, Wall Street Journal takes another poll.  It used to be just three decades ago about 10 percent of the people were governed democratically and now it’s over 60 percent.  That is a revolution in human affairs and we should all be very proud of it.

MR. MARSHALL:  If we could take the last two questions together and then given everyone to respond or make any closing comments. 

Hon. Michael Steele and Dr. Lawrence Bland continue the discussion.

Q: Dr. Lawrence Bland.  I’ll be as brief as I can.  I appreciate the opportunity to be here today.  We’re building at the rate of three prisons per month across the United States of America.  That’s a lot of prisons per month, each prison costing an estimated $100 million to construct.  We also have 600 concentration camps across the United States, and the reasons for that are what?  We’re locking up people after people after people.

I’ve sat here and listened to the dialogue of the panelists and I was a little disappointed.  I looked around in this room and I’m sure that there are a lot of Democrats in this room, but everything I heard from those eloquent panelists was an attack against the Democratic Party, our leadership in this instance.  It would have been fair to have someone representative of the Democratic Party at that panel to defend our issues as well.

It’s all right to be opinionated, but not to deliberately – you are polling experts.  If you set those standards by executing the right of others to be heard, you should be more unopinionated but print the polls as they actually are.  That’s not what I’m getting from you, and that’s a disappointment. 

Now they’re setting up these 600 concentration camps to lock up who?  Historically we’ve locked up black folks, Hispanics, historically.  Now something has to change in this process.  Can someone address that without taking a Republican point of view?  Take one in the moderate, if at all possible, to talk about people.

MS. MURPHY:  I am a registered independent.

Q:  You were independent and you said very clearly you were stepping back.  And I appreciate that.

MR. RASMUSSEN:  I’m a former Democrat and a former Republican.

            Q:  I worked for the Nixon administration, I was appointed under the Carter administration, but I know right from wrong.

            MR. MARSHALL:  And Ben is a registered Democrat.

            Q:  But you would never know that in a dialogue.  What I got was a Republican point of view.    I think I’ve made my point.  Thank you so much.

            MR. MARSHALL:  Thank you so much for your comment.  And if you can, sir, a question.  And as brief as possible and we’ll give everyone a final chance to comment.

            Q:  My name is Dr. Li Jia, and I’m a scientist, and I analyze the data and nobody can brainwash me.  I believe that.  I agree with you completely.  The question, I want to comment on something.  I remember two years ago when Michael Steele came to the China Society to give a talk about his campaign for the Senate.  The last sentence, I still remember in my mind.  You said those who have been the cause of the problem for so long cannot be the solution to the problem.

            I agree with you, and that’s a very good sentence, and I still remember that.  However, I see the Americans – (inaudible).  American image around the world is damaged, and our economy was in very bad shape, and we spent $2 trillion in the Iraq war.  Something has to be changed.  Just like Michael Steele said two years ago. 

            MR. MARSHALL:  Thank you very much for your comment.

            Let’s give just a couple of moments to each of our panelists for any final responses or comments.  Start with you, Ben, and work along.

            MR. WATTENBERG:  Let me go last.

            MR. MARSHALL:  Start with you, Patricia, and work the other way.

            MS. MURPHY:  I just want to thank you for having me.  It’s been wonderful, very educational.  I’m sure I’ll follow up to interview all of the panelists for my web site, and I just want to appreciate everybody for coming here today.  It’s great to see a room full of people at the end of New York Avenue here to talk about polling.

            MR. RASMUSSEN:  I think it’s really important when you hear something about polling data that you do more than accept a single number, that you take it in, you look at some of the details, and you get a sense of the bigger picture of what the story is about.  If you take a polling number as a precise statistical expression of something, you’ve already missed the point.  If you were trying to get a broad sense of what people think and you look at the question the way it was framed, the way it was responded to, it can be a very useful tool, and really be helpful to your understanding of what your neighbors think and what the political dynamic is in the nation today.

WMA Forum, “Political Polling and the Media”

MR. STEELE:  I want to thank everybody for the opportunity.  I just want to kind of end it this way.  I think the last little bit of this is a reflection of where America is, and there are people who have ideas and thoughts that they want to see expressed and they want to see shared and they want to see appreciated by those who may have a different perspective.  I can appreciate where the reverend’s coming from.  And sir, I can only say that as I sat on the stage in New Orleans a month ago as the only Republican on the panel of 20 people, sitting next to the likes of Dick Gregory, Al Sharpton, Donna Brazile, and so forth, and having an audience of some 7,000 Democrats before me, that I can appreciate where you’re coming from.

            But the point was that my expectation was not to have everyone sound like me, or for me to sound like everyone in the room, but to hear something different and to find some way to connect to it, and to appreciate a different perspective, one that I may not have heard before in my experience, and one that when I shared with them, they may not have heard before. 

            I think that is ultimately the job of the media, to be fair, balanced, and unbiased.  To accurately represent and reflect back to the community the living condition, the educational circumstances, the political dynamics, the legacy, the wealth creation, the fears and trepidation about war and peace.  I don’t need a media to tell me what to think.  I need a media to express to me what my neighbor may be saying, or what my neighbor in China, Taiwan, Tibet may be saying, so that I can better appreciate my place and my role in the world, so that when this man calls my home, I can tell him what I really think.  (Applause)

            MR. WATTENBERG:  Let me just wind up with a couple of thoughts that just came up.  I don’t think there has ever in world history been a society or a world that allows more free expression of ideas than the one we live in.  For a couple hundred dollars you can set up a blog and you’re all over the world.  It used to be that you had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy paper and presses and ink and delivery trucks and fight unions.  You get on your computer and you go – and so everybody’s voice is heard. 

            Secondly, the panelists did not pick the panel.  But it should be noted that the Washington Times is a paper I’ve been loosely affiliated with for many years, and I think it’s very fair to say it’s a conservatively oriented paper but its news stories are straight.  Its opinion columns are mostly conservative but not entirely conservative.  They run some moderates and they run some liberals.

            Now the other thing is just about Iraq again.  The people who are favoring the promotion and promulgation of democratic views and values are not simple do-gooders who say we want to impose our way of life on somebody else.  It is a well-known geopolitical axiom that democracies do not go to war with one another.  If you want to have a stable, peaceful world, a world without Hitler, without Stalin, without Castro, without the Japanese imperial military, without Pol Pot, what you want to do is promote democracy.  That yields stability and prosperity.  It also makes you feel good.  But forget about the feel good.  If you want to have a stable, prosperous world, you want to promote democracy.

            MR. MARSHALL:  I think that is an excellent note on which to end this session.  It’s been extremely interesting panel.  I’d like to thank all of you for coming, for your attention, your questions and comments.  Please give a final round of applause to our panelists, Ben Wattenberg, Michael Steele, Scott Rasmussen, and Patricia Murphy.  Thank you very much indeed. 

Lively discussions followed the question and answer session.