Beyond The Beltway – Issues In State and Local Politics

bannoncr — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 15:04:30 +0000

By Brad Bannon

For a number of reasons, state and local governments will be on their own trying to solve some of the most pressing problems facing the nation. Washington D.C. is focused on the war in Iraq. We have a presidential administration that believes in state and local government problem solving and it’s hard to get anything done inside the Beltway with the partisan divide between Congress and the White House.

Here are some of the issues that are likely to come up in state and local campaigns in 2008 in order of importance.

1. HEALTH CARE

If and when the war in Iraq ends, the federal government will focus on the biggest domestic concern which is health care. In the meantime, state governments will have to deal with popular demands for more affordable health care. Middle class incomes are stagnant but health care prices are soaring, so state governments will have to solve the problem. The federal program, the Child Health Insurance Program expires this year and congressional Democrats are trying to expand the program.

If the president blocks expansion of the CHIP program, the 2008 campaign will include a lot of discussion of what states can or should do to cover the millions of children who do not have health insurance. Political scientists believe that states are the laboratories for innovation in the nation, so it will be interesting to see how states deal with the health care crisis.

California and Massachusetts have recently enacted programs to provide insurance to the uninsured through private insurance companies. Other states like Maine and Oregon have created state run health insurance programs.

2. IMMIGRATION

Because of its inability to legislate the problem, the federal government has handed off another hot potato to state and local governments which is immigration. At the state and local level of government immigration is a fiscal issue as well as a social problem.

Many voters resent the fact that their tax dollars support programs for illegal immigrants. People also feel that the need to educate and care for illegal immigrants is too much of a strain on government budgets. Some states like California have made it more difficult for illegal immigrants to get drivers’ licenses.

Many states are also beefing up law enforcement efforts on the Mexican bolder since the efforts of the federal government to stop illegal crossings are stained to the max. Immigration may be the number 1 issue in the southwest. Immigration has replaced gay marriage as the hot button social issue of the day.

3. EDUCATION

A perennial concern at the state and local level of government is education. Education is the big ticket item for state and local governments. The issue will get even hotter between now and Election Day of 2008 because Bill Gates’ foundation plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on a media campaign to focus people on the issue before they vote. The Gates initiative will focus on reforms like preschool education, longer school days and merit pay for teachers.

4. TAXES

The inaction of the federal government has put pressure on state and local governments to come up with extra money to care for and educate their residents. .Education is the big ticket item for most state and local governments and health care is second with a bullet.

Since bad things roll downhill, there is a great deal of pressure at the local level on property tax rates. The property tax burden is especially heavy on seniors who own homes but don’t have enough income to pay property taxes.

Many seniors can’t afford to live in their own homes because of high property taxes. As the population gets older, more voters are increasingly reluctant to raise property taxes to pay for the education of the young.

Many states have tried to raise income and sales taxes in order to give seniors property tax relief but these efforts are tough because voters are cynical and don’t trust state government enough to believe that increases in income and sales taxes will lead to property tax decreases.

5. ECONOMY

The fallout from Hurricane Katrina brought Americans face to face with the ugly reality of poverty in America. And for the first time since the 1960’s, the discussion about economic issues revolves around ways to bring poor people into the mainstream of the American economy.

John Edwards has made poverty the signature issue of his presidential campaign. The official poverty rate has increased every year since 2001 and the lack of federal action has dumped the issue on state and local governments. Poverty is becoming a big issue because concern is not confined to the poor.

Middle class Americans fear that they are in danger of becoming poor. Incomes for middle class families have stagnated and consumers must pay for inflationary costs for health care, a surge in gasoline and significant increases in college tuition. One indication of the problem is that mortgage foreclosures are at a record high and many states are starting programs to help people keep their homes.

6. ENVIRONMENT

The environment, especially global warming, has emerged as the hot boutique issue of the 2008 campaign. It’s not just Al Gore and decades of disaster movies.

The violence of Hurricane Katrina convinced many voters that something is wrong with the environment. Katrina prompted the home insurance industry to redline coastal areas.

This has prompted many states to start their own insurance programs for homes in potentially dangerous areas. Because the federal government has not acted to the threat of global warming, the states have sprung into action. California which is the nation’s trendsetter in politics and policy has mandated that vehicles sold in the state significantly improve gas mileage by 2010.

Many state and local governments are discouraging development in coastal areas. One thing that makes this issue easier to address is that voters are increasingly aware that environmental safeguards are good economic policy.

READER WARNING

A warning is in order about the use of issues in political campaigns. People vote for people and not for issues. Swing voters are personality driven and they listen to the candidates mainly to make a judgment about the character of the candidates. So you can talk about issues until the cows come home but unless the candidates talk about the issues to make a point about the kind of person that he or she is, campaign rhetoric will fall on deaf ears.

High Tech and High Touch: The Use of Polls and Focus Groups in Political Campaigns

bannoncr — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:43:15 +0000

April 2006
By Brad Bannon

Survey research is more than numbers; it is about words and feelings. For this reason, survey research should be about focus groups and not just polls.

In political research, polling and focus groups should go together like a horse and carriage. But, often the only kind of research that campaigns conduct is a poll. Polls serve an important need in politics but they are rigid, structured and formal.

If a political campaign is an effort to build a candidate and win an election, the information from the poll would provide the skeleton and the focus groups would supply the skin. Conducting a poll without doing focus groups is a lot like having an ice cream sundae without the whipped cream topping.

But, what are focus groups and what do they do? Focus groups are in depth discussions with ten to twelve voters for a period of one and a half to two hours that deal with candidates, issues and verbiage. They are meetings with voters selected at random by phone within defined demographic parameters that offer in-depth information that mold the campaign into a being.

Political insiders like to believe that they know everything about the issues and images that surround a campaign but the focus groups give voters an unfiltered chance to tell us what they think is important. In this period of political discontent, anytime you give voters the chance to sound off, the better you will be to understand a hostile political environment.

A professional moderator guides the discussion to acquire the information that the campaign requires. The time you have to talk to voters in focus groups is an important part of the process. There is just so much information that you can get from voters in a 20 minute baseline survey.

The discussion in a focus group gives the researcher the luxury to probe in some detail the nuances of an issue that you can not begin to deal with in a 20 minute baseline telephone survey.

The focus group experience offers valuable vocabulary lessons for the campaign. Political insiders use specialized language or jargon that is either incomprehensible or misleading to voters. Focus groups give you the chance to learn the language that voters use to describe the issues that they worry about.

I once conducted focus groups in suburban Virginia for a coalition of environmental groups. The purpose of the groups was to discuss the problem of suburban sprawl. The problem was that the word that my clients liked to use to describe the problem, “sprawl”, had a positive meaning to voters. When I asked focus group participants to tell me what they thought of when they heard the word, “sprawl”, they told me that it meant having room to be comfortable. Overdevelopment was a much better word for the environmental groups to use in their communications because that word had a clear negative connotation.

If you do decide to conduct focus groups, and you should if you have the budget, it is important to keep them loosely structured. Many researchers make the mistake of conducting very formal and structured focus groups. Focus groups are an opportunity to collect impressions not more numbers.

While polls are very structured and are used to complement the data you get from a baseline survey, focus groups should be informal so that voters have the chance to raise their own issues and concerns. The best way to organize the discussion in a focus group is to get participants comfortable with the moderator and each other. Have everybody introduce themselves and tell a little bit about their kids or jobs. I like to start groups by talking about my kids so that the participants can identify with me.

Then start the discussion by asking participants whether or not they think things in the country, state or county are going in the right or wrong direction and ask them why they think that way. The questioning can become more direct as the group continues.

One of the decisions that the campaign has to make is whether to conduct the groups before or after the baseline survey. There are arguments on both sides but my opinion is that focus groups are most valuable before the campaign does the baseline survey.

The best reason to do focus groups first is that the information from the groups may provide valuable insight into the construction of the baseline questionnaire. The people in the campaign will have strong ideas about the questionnaire based on their knowledge of the area. The researcher will also have firm ideas about the content of the questionnaire on the basis of his or her polls in other areas.

But if you do the focus groups before you conduct the baseline survey, the voters in the groups will raise issues that neither the researcher nor client would have come up with on their own.

There are, of course, limitations to focus groups. A poll is a systematic and scientific measurement of public opinion based on the random selection of voters to interview If you are careful and you select a truly random sample of 600 voters in Virginia or any other state, you can be confident that you are accurately measuring public opinion within a margin of plus or minus 4%. But there is little chance that talking to a collection of 12 voters in a focus group is representative of anything.

To deal with the reliability problem, you have to be very careful how you conduct the groups and interpret the information you get from a focus group. You should always conduct focus groups in pairs among specific types of voters. If you believe that you have problems or opportunities with women over the age of fifty, older women would make an attractive focus group opportunity.

The most important thing however is to use the qualitative information from the focus group in conjunction with the quantitative information you get from the baseline survey. You may learn from the poll what issue is most important to voters, but the focus groups will tell you how to talk about that issue.

A Consumers’ Guide To Getting The Most Out Of Your Poll

bannoncr — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:17:19 +0000

Friday, September 03, 2004
By: Brad Bannon

After years of struggle, the campaign industry has reached a point, I hope, where just about everybody in the business understands the necessity of polling. But what still is a fight is the question of how to use the poll after you take the time, trouble and money to conduct one.

After 25 years in this business, it still amazes me how little use people make of the polling they do. I now use the time I spent trying to convince people to poll trying to get them to use the poll to make tactical and strategic decisions after campaigns conduct a survey.

There are good and bad reasons to conduct political surveys.

The first bad reason to do survey research is because somebody from Washington told you to do one. Use the survey to inform the decisions that you have to make during the campaign. Both Democratic and Republican operatives undergo intensive campaign training and from the national party committees and affiliated interest groups and during the courses, the budding political stars receive checklists of things they should do when they get back to their campaigns. High on the things to do checklists they receive is “do a baseline poll”. Obediently the managers hire a pollster, conduct a baseline survey and then file the research away without plugging the data or the pollster into the campaign decision making process. At his point the thick poll book becomes nothing more than an expensive doorstop.

The second bad reason to do a poll is to confirm what you already think you know. Sometimes campaign operatives use polls like drunks use lampposts for support rather than illumination. So if you are doing a survey just to prove that the candidate is well known and much loved then you are ignoring the rich complexities of voter psychology that you can get from a poll. The first rule for success in politics is to know what you don’t know. A survey can open a whole new world of insights into the psyche of the electorate. So don’t limit your horizons by ignoring the data that conflicts with your perception of reality.

There are three good reasons to poll and they are to answer the questions about the what, why and how of the voter psychology.

The answer to the “what” question is a simple one. Any idiot can answer the “what” question, which probably explains my longevity in the business. This is simply an exercise in determining what voters think and what they feel about the personalities and issues involved in the campaign. What issues do voters worry about? What do the voters like and dislike about the incumbent or about the challenger?

At this point, many pollsters fell that they have done their job and unfortunately many managers let them off the hook at this point. But if you want to use the baseline survey to help you make vital tactical and strategic decisions, you need to get under the hood, kick the tires and find out why voters think the things they think and feel the way they feel. It is not enough to know what percentage of voters like and dislike the candidate or what number of voters worries about a particular issue. The pollster needs to be able to tell his or her client why voters like or dislike the incumbent and the challenger. The best way to get at the answers to the why questions is to present voters with batteries of pointed statements that they can agree or disagree with. Then the pollster with sophisticated statistical tools can precisely examine the correlations between these pointed positive and negative statements and voter preferences.

Once the pollster, hopefully me has been able to tell the client, hopefully you what voters are thinking and feeling and why they are thinking and feeling whatever it is, they are thinking and felling then the real work starts. At that point, the pollster’s job is to work with you and your other consultants to answer the most important question, which is the “how” question. The ‘how” question is how you talk to voters to move in your direction once you know what they know and understand their motivations. The answer to the “how” question is the theme or message for you campaign communications.

Anybody who has the capacity to print up some business cards can become a pollster. But the only pollsters who can help you win are the pollsters who can answer the what, why and how questions of voter psychology.

Brad Bannon: Elections are easy, now comes the hard part for Democrats

bannoncr — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:06:14 +0000

Nov 10, 2006 5:00 AM

by Brad Bannon, The Examiner

WASHINGTON – Democrats should enjoy their honeymoon because it won’t last very long. Public opinion is as fuckle as a celebrity marriage, and the Democratic victory on Tuesday will create problems, as well as possibilities, for the party.

Brad Bannon: It started with a kiss

bannoncr — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:01:54 +0000

Aug 7, 2006 5:00 AM

by Brad Bannon, The Examiner

WASHINGTON – The Democratic primary in Connecticut for United States Senate between the incumbent Joe Lieberman and his challenger Ned Lamont on Aug. 8 and is much more important than any other primary election this year. Any race for the United States Senate is high stakes poker to begin with, but this Senate race has profound implications for the balance of power in the Democratic Party now and for the 2008 campaign for president.

Lamont’s challenge interestingly enough began with a hug and a kiss. After his State of the Union speech to Congress earlier this year, President Bush hugged and kissed Joe Lieberman.

This innocent peck on the cheek turned into the kiss of death that might end Senator’s romance with the Democratic voters of Connecticut.

Fueled by discontent with the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq and Sen. Lieberman’s staunch support of the president’s policies there, cable TV executive and millionaire Ned Lamont is a threat to score a big upset in the primary.

The senator and his challenger are in a tight race, and a Lamont victory would be a tremendous boost and strengthen the liberal ‘netroots’ as a force in the 2006 race and in choosing a 2008 Democratic presidential nominee.

A Lamont triumph would put immediate pressure on the Democratic congressional leadership to take a hard stand to set a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

A Lamont victory would also make life more difficult for Sen. Hillary Clinton, who is traveling the middle road on Iraq on her way to the White House.

The primary split within the Democratic Party is the battle between the progressive ‘blogoshere’ of Internet political activists and the Democratic establishment in Washington, D.C.

The progressive ‘netroots’ movement believes that the Democratic beltway establishment has been too timid dealing with the President, especially his Iraq War policies.

The internet activists proved to be a big financial and organizational boost to the presidential candidacy of former Vermont governor, Howard Dean in 2002 and he was the first Democratic presidential candidate that year to sharply criticize the President’s performance.

The liberal ‘netroots’ had been sharply critical of Senator Lieberman’s support of the Administration’s Iraq policies for years and this year they found their champion in Mr. Lamont.

In fact, the most prominent progressive blogger, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, editor of the popular ‘Daily Kos’ has promoted the Lamont campaign and even appeared in one of Lamont’s campaign ads.

If Ned Lamont wins his primary, his victory will strengthen the hand of Mr. Zuniga and his fellow bloggers in their battle against the Washington Democratic establishment and give them much more influence on the selection of a Democratic presidential candidate in 2008.

A Lamont victory would also strengthen positions of the doves like Lamont, who want the Democratic Party to come out for setting a firm date for the withdrawal of American troops out of Iraq.

When John Murtha, a Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania and Vietnam War veteran, called for a redeployment of American troops from Iraq, many Democrats criticized his proposal because they feared it would hurt Democratic prospects in the off-year congressional elections.

Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin was also on the receiving end of attacks from fellow Democrats when he sponsored a resolution to set a firm deadline for American military withdrawal from Iraq.

Sen. Lieberman voted against the Feinstein resolution and a much milder proposal sponsored by Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island.

But if Lieberman loses his primary, Congressman Murtha and Senator Feingold will have many more Democratic supporters for their Iraq policies on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Feingold is also running for president in 2008 and a Lamont victory would make the presidential bid of Sen. Hillary Clinton more difficult.

To the horror of the liberal bloggers, Sen. Clinton has taken a moderate stance on Iraq.

The senator from New York has criticized the President’s conduct of the war but opposed proposals to withdraw American troops.

Unlike other Democratic presidential candidates like Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts or former Sen. John Edwards, she has refused to apologize for her vote in favor of a congressional resolution to authorize the war in the first place.

If Ned Lamont wins the Connecticut Democratic primary for the United States Senate on Tuesday, you can expect much more aggressive Democratic calls for American withdrawal on Wednesday.

Brad Bannon is a Democratic political consultant.

Public Wants Demonstrated Leadership As Democrats Take Control of Congress

bannoncr — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:56:53 +0000

Thursday, June 21st, 2007
By Brad Bannon

When sailors navigate, they look to the stars. When politicians legislate, they look to the polls. But sometimes, the sky is cloudy and often polls are contradictory. Then you have to go with your gut.

The new Democratic congressional majority has already done a lot to repair the image of a Congress that fell into disrepute under Republic control, but the Democrats still have a lot of work to do.

According to national Gallup surveys, Congress’ job rating has improved since the Democrats took control but public confidence in Congress still is not very good. Last December only a fifth (21%) of Americans gave Congress a negative job rating while three quarters (74%) of Americans assigned the legislative branch negative grades. The net negative for Congress’s job rating was 53% i April.

Gallup reported that Congress’ positive job rating was up slight to 33% while the negative was down to 60% which is a 27% net negative rating. If the Democratic congressional leadership wants to improve the Congress’ image before Election Day in 2008, they will have to take bold steps. The Democratic leadership will have to lead, follow or get out of the way.

The legislation that the new Democratic majority in the House passed in the first hundred hours was easy pickings because there was a clear public consensus on the issues that House Democrats dealt with early in the session. Big majorities of voters wanted a higher minimum wage, implementation of the recommendations of the 9/11 commission and stronger ethics rules.

But Americans also want Congress to solve problems that require heavy lifting like the war in Iraq and high health care costs. These problems will be tougher to tackle since there is no consensus on the solutions. Now that House Democrats have picked the low hanging fruit, they are moving on to the really tough issues.

The legislative process resembles basketball. You start the game and make a few easy lay-ups to build your confidence. Then you take longer shots until you hit 3 pointers from beyond the arc.

National surveys indicate that ending American involvement in Iraq is the most pressing problem for voters. The only question is how.

In a survey that the Associated Press conducted in the middle of February, Americans said they didn’t like the war but they didn’t want to cut off the funding that keeps the war going. Only two out of five (39%) Americans think the war is a worthy cause while over half (56%) think it is a hopeless cause. However, only three out of ten (29%) Americans want to cut the funding while two thirds of the public opposes the idea.

But the support for war funding has been decreasing over the last few months. The same goes for escalation of the war. Almost two thirds (63 %) of the public opposes the president’s plan to send more troops to Iraq but only four out of every ten (38%) of Americans want to stop funding the troop surge.

Americans are passionately ambivalent about the war in Iraq and all of the great issues of the day. Since Americans don’t spend a lot of time thinking about these issues, they are not under great pressure to make sure that all of their opinions on a particular issue are ideologically consistent. The goal of leadership is for politicians to take strong stands on the issues and help Americans resolve and reconcile their ambivalence.

Because there is no national consensus on how to end the war, congressional Democrats are moving cautiously. But the war in Vietnam did not effectively end until Congress cut off funding. Of course, Democrats can wait until the United States elects a new president who will probably bring the war to an end. But the delay will cost the lives of hundreds of brave American men and women and billions of dollars for a lost cause.

The same goes for the top domestic concern which is making sure that all Americans have health insurance. Late in February, CBS News conducted a national survey to measure attitudes to health care reform. Even though, there is a lot of concern about health care access, there is no consensus on how to solve the problem.

Just less than half of all Americans believe that the federal government should guarantee health care for everybody if it meant that the cost of their own insurance went up. Only half of the public would be willing to pay higher taxes to provide health care for all.

Democrats worry about being pilloried and hillaried on this issue, so they plan on taking incremental steps like expanding eligibility for Medicaid and children’s health insurance programs. But Democrats should use the popular desire for change to fight for a universal health care program, which would fundamentally change and improve the system.

Legislators don’t usually want to take on an issue until six or seven tenths of Americans are ready to support the initiative. Since this kind of consensus doesn’t exist on Iraq or health care, Congressional Democrats will have to create one. Congressional Democrats may not have enough votes to pass anything over the president’s veto but they do have enough strength to stand for something.

A strong agenda demonstrates leadership and gives Democrats the opportunity to show voters what the party can do if it controls Congress and the White House.

Brad Bannon is president of Bannon Communications Research, a firm that polls for Democrats, labor unions and issue groups.

Red Faces and Exit Poll Blues

bannoncr — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:52:29 +0000

June 21st, 2007
Wednesday, December 01, 2004

By Brad Bannon

The good news for the polling industry was that the national telephone surveys conducted over the days leading up to the presidential election reflected the actual election result with most of them showing President Bush with a slim lead over his Democratic challenger John Kerry. The bad news is that the post-election exit polls conducted after the Americans had voted were way off.

Even in an imperfect world, a post-election survey should reflect the actual results better than a pre election survey.

In a pre-election survey, the pollster faces several problems. First, you have to find people to talk to which is a major problem when you’re trying to call people at home on land lines. Once you reach the person at the phone number from your sample, you have to figure out if the person you’re talking to (a.k.a., the respondent) is actually someone who is going to vote which in itself is a matter of some difficulty. People also might change their minds during the time period leading up to the election.

More after the jump…

In theory, at least, you don’t have any of these problems with an exit poll and therefore the in person surveys conducted at polling places should be a better reflection of reality than the pre election telephone surveys.

In effect, the exit pollster has the luxury of dealing with a captive audience which means the researcher has a better chance of capturing public opinion accurately. You don’t have to worry about identifying likely voters because all you have to do is to talk to every fourth, eighth or tenth person coming out of randomly chosen polling place and ask them how they just voted.

Despite the methodological advantages that exit pollsters have, they managed to find a way to screw up the numbers. The national exit poll indicated that Kerry won 51% of the vote and beat the President by 3%. The truth is of course that the President won 51% of the vote and beat Senator Kerry by 3%. And when you consider that the national sample size is more than 13,000 voters and the margin of error is so small, it is clear that someone was asleep at the switch. When you interview so many voters and come up so far short, something is seriously wrong.

The picture for the exit poll results in the battleground states is not any prettier. Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania wrote an interesting analysis of the state by state exit results and he found that exit polls reported a significantly higher Kerry vote than the actual vote in 10 of the 11 battleground states that he examined.

In Ohio where the researchers had the chance to interview almost 2000 real live voters, they came up with Kerry leading by 4 points and Bush won by more than 2 points. I would like to think that a class of political science majors at Ohio State could have interviewed half that many voters on Election Day and come up with a result that better reflected the reality of the outcome in the Buckeye State. In New Hampshire, which is small, homogeneous and fairly easy to poll in, the exit poll had Kerry up by 11% and he ended up winning the state by only 2%.

The word snafu is an old U.S. Army acronym for Situation Normal All F*#@ed Up and it pretty much describes the state of the exit polls. In 2000, the exit polls in Florida played a role in the Sunshine State election crisis. In 2002, the entire system crashed and the networks were not able to report the results of the exit surveys until several days after the election, which might have been a blessing instead of a curse. And during the afternoon of Election Day this year, potential Kerry administration appointees were measuring the drapes in their new White House offices after they looked at the exit poll data which was circulating pretty freely on various web sites.

The folks at Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International have not yet come up with a plausible explanation for the discrepancy between the exit poll numbers and the actual results. But they had better, because the media is spending $10 million a cycle on the exits and there are a lot of unhappy reporters who spent the afternoon of Election Day working on Kerry in the White House stories that will never see the light of day.

The folks at Edison and Mitosky argue that the polls are designed to explain why people voted the way they do and are not supposed to be predictive of the result. But if they don’t do a better job getting the basic numbers right, no one is going to take the valuable data on voting behavior in the exits very seriously.

Brad Bannon is president of Bannon Communications Research which has designed poll driven messages for the last 20 years for labor unions, Democrats and progressive issue groups. You can reach Brad at Brad@BannonCR.com.

Polls . . . Polls . . . Polls . . . Lots of Numbers But What do the Professionals Look At?

bannoncr — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:51:37 +0000

Friday, August 06, 2004

By Brad Bannon

Watching the polls is not nearly as interesting as watching Catherine Zeta Jones but it is an election year and a presidential election year at that and we are political professionals so we should be keeping close tabs on the national political surveys. And if we use the national polls to understand the presidential race, we should use them for good not for evil. The biggest problem with the national political surveys conducted by news organizations is the reliance and the prominence of the trial heats. The head to heads are the first and sometimes only thing that the sponsors report. But if you really want to understand the public opinion environment that governs the presidential race, you have to go to the poll websites to look under the hood and kick the tires.

Read more after the jump…

You can look at trial heats until the cows come home, but the only set of numbers that really mean anything at this point in the presidential campaign are the right direction and wrong track figures. Bush may be a few points ahead of Kerry or a few points behind but recent polls indicate that a majority of Americans feel the country is going in the wrong direction. A June Gallup national poll showed that two out of three Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. It will be very difficult for President Bush to win a second term if Americans still feel this pessimistic on Election Day.

As Democrats learned the hard way, the popular vote that the national polls measure is not the bottom line in a presidential election. In fact the networks could eliminate their polling programs and save millions of dollars and keep an eye on the people who actually elect the president; the justices of the United States Supreme Court. But if we want to keep tabs on voters through the national polls, we should look at the surveys intelligently or not use them at all.

The focus of the activity in 2004 presidential race is in 18 battleground states which I will not take the trouble to list since we all know which states they are. Because these battleground states are so important to the outcome of the presidential election, the national polling totals are not particularly useful. In other words, it doesn’t help John Kerry much if he is ahead in a national Pew Center survey by five points, if he is losing the battleground states by five points. When CNN commissions a Gallup survey, it usually reports the results of the presidential head to head nationally and cross tabulations for the voters who live in the swing states.

In life, the devil is in the details and in survey research the angel is in the crosstabs. It is nice to know that John Kerry is ahead by a few points but it is a lot better to know how the presidential candidates are faring with key voter groups such as the people who are living in the battleground states, soccer moms, NASCAR dads or political independents.

It is not uncommon to see differences in the heads to heads among national surveys conducted at about the same time. There are several reasons for the discrepancies in the trial heats.

The order of the questions affects the head to heads. When Ronald Reagan was President, he always did better in surveys when the trial heat was at the beginning of the survey than he performed in surveys where the head to head was towards the end. Why? Apparently voters who supported President Reagan were less likely to do so after they had the chance to hear and respond to questions about the issues of the day.

The methodology that pollsters use to select respondents also influences the outcomes of the trial heats. Some surveys interview Americans they consider likely to vote; some question all registered voters and others interview all Americans 18 or over whether they are registered voters or not. Why interview unregistered Americans?

Because both the Democrats and Republicans are working hard to register millions of new voters between now and Election Day so pollsters should be trying to figure out what politically inactive Americans might do if they get involved. In a June Gallup survey, Kerry had a 2 point lead among all Americans; a 3 point lead with registered voters and a 6 percentage point lead among likely voters.

Trial heats have the shelve lives of J-Lo’s marriages. Even accurate head to heads give the misleading impression that attitudes are set in stone. In March, the Pew Center conducted a national survey which showed Senator Kerry leading President Bush by a margin of 48% to 46% with only 6% of the voters undecided.

But when the Pew Center factored in voters who had only a tentative commitment to supporting their choice, the result was that almost a third of all voters were up for grabs. That’s way there will be more twists and turns in this year’s presidential race than there are in a rollercoaster.

Brad Bannon is president of Bannon Communications Research which for 20 years has designed poll driven messages for Democrats, labor unions and issue groups. You can reach him at Brad@BannonCR.com

In 2006, All Politics Has Become National and That Bodes Badly for the Republicans

bannoncr — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:50:08 +0000

Sunday, June 04, 2006

By Brad Bannon

Usually it’s “all politics is local” but this year, it may be that “all politics is national”.

The national public opinion climate looks pretty bleak for Republicans. Only one out of every three Americans approve of George W. Bush’s performance as President. Two out of every three Americans believe that the United States is off on the wrong track. The approval rating for the GOP controlled Congress is even lower than the President’s rating as only a quarter of the public give thumbs up to the folks on Capitol Hill. What does this mean for Republicans up and down the ballot this year? Big Trouble.

Find out more after the jump…

Historically, national public opinion is only a small part of the equation in off year elections. In most cases, voters in each congressional district vote ignore the big national issues and vote on the basis of their feelings towards their own congressman or congresswoman and conditions locally.

But this year, the problems facing the voter are national or international problems like Iraq, gasoline prices and corruption in Washington. These are issues that might nationalize what are usually local elections and the national prevailing winds are blowing Democratic.

This is one of the rare years when all politics might even be international. This is a year when the election is more about guns than it is butter and normally that would be a big advantage for the GOP. Since 9/11 national security has been at the top of the voter priority list.

In 2002 and in 2004, the Bush campaign has been able to raise fears about terrorism and convert those concerns into Republican votes. But this year, voters are focusing on the War in Iraq and that is bad news for Republicans.

Recent national polls indicate that the war in Iraq is doing to George W. Bush what the Vietnam War did to Lyndon Baines Johnson. A clear majority of Americans now believe that it was a mistake to go to war against Iraq. More than half of the American public also thinks that the President lied to them about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.

Troop withdrawals before Election Day will help the GOP but as long as troop casualties mount and expenditures increase, Americans are ready to go through the roof in November.

Other issues seem so intractable to voters that they just might want to vent their anger against the governing party just to make themselves feel better. Besides Iraq, the rising price of gasoline is a major voter worry. And voters link energy prices with instability in the Middle East, so the price of gasoline is where the rubber meets the road at the intersection of foreign affairs and domestic policy.

Because of the ties between the oil companies and the President and the Vice President, Americans have little confidence that the Republican Party can do anything to decrease gas prices. High gas prices will drive many Americans to the polls (if they can afford to get there) to vote against Republican candidates

National polls indicate that Americans agree with Lord Acton’s axiom that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And since Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress, voters are ready to accept the culture of corruption argument that the Democrats are trying to sell.

The corruption argument is not the biggest problem facing Republicans but it does fuel the voter appetite for change. The corruption issue could become stronger if Democrats are able to link increases in energy and health care prices to the cozy relationships that Republicans have with corporate lobbyists in Washington.

But an analysis of the national surveys indicates that the biggest problem facing the Republican Party is the Republican Party. Recent national polls are showing that many Republicans and Conservatives do not approve of the performances of their own President and their own party. The disapproval of the Republican base is a function of unhappiness with the administration’s failure to control rising budget deficits and illegal immigration.

Turnout is low in mid term elections and therefore the outcome in November will hinge on the ability of each party to turn out its partisans. And right now the national surveys indicate that Republicans feel alienated and disinclined to vote. If Republicans fail to vote and Democrats turn out en masse, the effects on the GOP could be devastating all the way down to the local level.

Six months before the election, Democrats have a double digit lead over Republicans in national generic trial heats and that reflects the interest in the elections among Democratic partisans and the disdain that many Republicans feel towards supporting the policies of their own President and party in the mid term elections.

There are factors that could mitigate the anti Republican tide. Because of their ties to corporate America, Republicans have a big financial advantage. The redistricting that the Republicans have been able to do in the last decade has created a congressional battlefield that is favorable to the GOP.

Amy Walters of the Cook Political Report has suggested that the GOP has built a protective levee system that might save the party from a force three hurricane. The problem is that the national public opinion environment is shaping up as a force four or five storm.

Over the years, I have learned the hard way that public opinion can stop and turn on a dime. But Republicans have to hope that something dramatic happens before Election Day to avoid massive GOP losses.

The situation in Iraq appears to be intractable and it doesn’t look like gasoline prices will go down anytime soon. But the biggest problem for the Republicans is that their standard bearer, the President, doesn’t have much credibility with voters because of his assertions about the presence of WMD’s in Iraq before the start of the war.

And because voters don’t trust the president, he can talk until he turns blue in the face to try to reverse GOP fortunes but voters just don’t believe him anymore.

Brad Bannon is president of Bannon Communications Research which polls for Democratic candidates, labor unions and issue groups.

The Polls Speak but the Polls Aren’t Listening As Public, Political Perceptions & Goals Differ

bannoncr — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:47:43 +0000

Sunday, July 03, 2005

By Brad Bannon

At the national, state and local level there are a lot of angry voters these days and a lot of that anger is a function of the chasm between the issues that politicians talk about and the problems that voters worry about.

Current events in Washington DC illustrate the problem. While members in Congress fiddle with the fates of Terry Schiavo and faceless figures like John Bolton and Priscilla Owen, Americans focus on the two big issues of the day- the economy and Iraq.

MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM

War in Iraq 19%
Economy/Jobs 19%
Terrorism 7%
Social Security 5%

More after the jump…

CBS/New York Times Survey of Adult Americans May 2005

A CBS News national survey conducted during the third week of May indicated that one out of every five Americans thought that the war in Iraq was the biggest problem facing the nation and about the same number of Americans worried most about the condition of the economy. With the politicians and the people running in different directions, it is hardly surprising that only three of every ten Americans approve of the performance of Congress and only two of out ten Americans believe that Congress has the same priorities as they do.

In Congress, the state legislature or on the city council, the temptation is to put process over policy. The challenge for legislators is to translate process into policy and speak to the issues that voters really care about. Senators who oppose the nomination of John Bolton as United States ambassador to the United Nations should fixate less on Bolton’s temper and his attitude towards the UN and should focus more on his habit of shaping intelligence estimates to political ends. The political shaping of intelligence estimates got us into a lot of trouble in Iraq. And Iraq is an issue that Americans really care about a lot.

Democrats who oppose the President’s federal judge nominees should say a lot less about the extremism of the judges and a lot more about their hostility to the economic interests of consumers and working people.

The same thing happens at the state and local level. The issue concerns of California residents were fairly clear in a Field Poll conducted earlier this year. This issue mix is fairly common across the country at the state and local level and is obviously different the issue mix at the federal level.

CALIFORNIA FIELD POLL

EXTREMELY CONCERNED ABOUT ISSUES
WELL BEING OF CHILDREN   77%
EDUCATION AND SCHOOLS   72%
HEALTH CARE   64%

Survey of Adult Residents of California March 2005

There is a lot of talk these days in Sacramento about legislative reapportionment but the problem of children is high on the hit parade of issues that Californians worry about. The concern about kids is common at the state and local level these days. Many voters are skeptical about the need for state and local action. But there is a widespread belief that state and local governments if nothing else should have an active role in improving the lives of children since they can’t take care of themselves.

So if you are a state legislator who desires to broaden state health care programs, the best place to start is to make the case that all children should have access to quality health care regardless of income. Voters who are skeptical about universal health care programs in general might very well accept the idea that kids at least should have access to quality health care.

The issue mix at the local level is similar to the mix at the state level but there is a twist. In February of this year, the New York Times asked residents of the city about the issues that residents cared about most and the big winners were crime and education.

NEW YORK TIMES SURVEY

MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE FACING THE CITY
CRIME 21%
EDUCATION 20%

Survey of adult residents of New York City February 2005

While education is part of the issue mix at the state and local level, voters these days see crime as the preserve of local governments. May times there is a connection between the two issues as voters see unruly kids as the source and the victims or much of the crime. For this reason, programs that are popular with voters at the local level are police crackdowns on juvenile gangs and programs to keep guns out of schools and out of the hands of kids.

The key thing to remember though, whether you are in Congress, the state legislature or on the city council, is to avoid the process trap and always pitch your actions to policies or issues that the voters care about. The more legislators deal with policy and not process, the less the danger is that voters will get angry and think that the salons are out of step with popular priorities. And legislators who fall out of touch with popular priorities are not likely to be legislators much longer.

Bannon is president of Bannon Communications Research which for 20 years has designed poll driven messages for Democrats, labor unions and issue groups. You can reach him at [send email to Brad@BannonCR.com via gmail] Brad@BannonCR.com with questions, comments or complaints.