Feigning science, polls toy with Nevada media, voters

Michael J. Mishak

Sunday, Aug. 20, 2006 | 7:42 a.m.

In politics, one day you're up, the next day you're down. But as a candidate in Nevada, you can be both at the same time.

Just ask failed Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bob Beers. Depending on which poll you read in the days leading up to last week's primary, the hulking anti-tax champion was either hopelessly behind or within a whisker of the lead.

The confusion might have unsettled Beers and his opponents in the Republican primary. It was far worse for voters.

Instead of reading about polls intended to accurately measure the strength of the candidates, voters were fed self-serving surveys, leaving them only to guess at the truth.

Days before the election, the Beers campaign touted the results of a poll paid for by one of his backers. It showed that he had closed to within 2 percentage points of the leader and eventual winner, Rep. Jim Gibbons.

Message to Beers supporters: You gotta vote!

About the same time, the Gibbons campaign released results from its poll, showing the congressman with a 20-point lead.

Message to Beers supporters: Don't bother voting. He's a goner.

No one knows what effect the dueling polls had on the outcome. Gibbons won by 20 points.

But to respected pollsters, news organizations and political experts outside Nevada, the role that public opinion polls played in the race for governor and other campaigns in the state this year is nothing short of astonishing. As in, astonishingly bad.

"Campaign pollsters are in the business of winning elections," says Cliff Zukin, former president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research and professor of public policy at Rutgers University. "They're not in the business of enlightening the public."

The fault doesn't lie with the candidates. Who can blame campaigns for trying for an advantage by tilting polls or releasing only selective results? Rather, the problem in Nevada is with a media that plays along with the manipulation.

"I can't think of another major metropolitan area where the results of an auto-dial poll lead the 6 o'clock news," says Ryan Erwin, a longtime local Republican consultant.

Around the country, major news organizations and reputable smaller ones trust only their own polling and, to a lesser extent, independent polls with track records for accuracy.

Those organizations are highly suspicious of polls paid for by campaigns or interest groups because they know the results are often slanted - then passed off as science. It's a cruel deceit, piggybacking on the public trust carefully built by independent pollsters.

Many news media outside Nevada either simply do not report those suspect polls, or do so only in passing - and then only if their news staffs have evaluated the polling method and the questions.

Now welcome to Nevada. No independent firms here conduct political polling. The Las Vegas Review-Journal hires the well-regarded Mason-Dixon polling firm in Washington, D.C., to conduct survey research in Nevada. But beyond that, campaign season in Southern Nevada is a poll slinger's free-for-all.

"It's great for campaigns to present information in a vacuum," says Dan Schnur, a lecturer of political science at the University of Southern California and national director of communications for Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign in 2000. "It's the voters that suffer. From a campaign's perspective, it's a gift from the political gods."

The closest thing to a statewide independent poll, in recent memory, was a survey conducted by national pollster Peter Hart, who enjoys a stellar reputation. Even so, the poll was commissioned by Nevada's gaming industry, which is deeply involved in state politics.

Television stations and many newspapers routinely report poll results released by campaigns or other special interests - which means that polls themselves become just another tool the campaigns use to try to sway voters. (The Sun shuns political polls but has published some findings from the Hart poll, based on his reputation.)

UNLV political scientist David Damore says the credibility of many political polls here - including the ones conducted by Mason-Dixon - is questionable.

"We've got a hodgepodge of things here," he says.

Some pollsters, he says, go wrong by giving too much emphasis - oversampling - to rural Nevadans because they are generally more likely to vote than Clark County residents. Other pollsters use unreliable technology, such as auto-dialing, a process by which respondents answer questions by pushing buttons, instead of speaking with a person. Still, others release information selectively, without providing copies of a poll's questionnaire or methodology.

Reading into such polls is a "recipe for misinterpreting the dynamics of a race," says Marc Ambinder, an associate editor of The Hotline, a Washington, D.C., political newsletter.

A well-timed campaign poll, shopped to media early in an election, can turn on or off financial support for candidates. Polls published late in the campaign can turn the tide of a race, killing the turnout for a rival candidate.

"Everybody's trying to play mind games with the reporters and the editors," says Brad Coker, managing partner of Mason-Dixon. "Editorial decisions get based on perceptions."

Zukin, the polling expert from Rutgers, says there's no substitute for independent research.

In California, for example, news organizations can turn to at least three respected, independent polls, as well as The Los Angeles Times poll, which conducts its own research in the state.

Nationally, the Times poll is among a bevy of respected independent research operations, including the Harris Poll, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the New York Times/CBS News Poll.

Susan Pincus, director of The Los Angeles Times poll, says that "not all partisan polls are bad. But they have an agenda." Pincus says that before using any information from a partisan poll, reporters should always examine a copy of the complete document. Something as simple as the wording of the questions or the order in which they're asked could dramatically affect the outcome.

"Everyone is doing polls these days," Pincus says. "Not everyone is doing them well."

A major reason that neutral organizations don't do more polling is cost. A basic poll designed to achieve a 3-4 percent margin of error easily costs a minimum of five figures and can go many times higher, depending on variables.

As newsroom budgets are slashed across the country, fewer papers are doing their own polls and, as a result, more journalists are turning to surveys conducted for campaigns, says Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew center.

While that may give reporters a raw scorecard of who's winning a race, it also allows candidates to control the debate throughout the course of a campaign.

In Nevada, more often than not, the press is eager to make the trade-off.

For instance, a Gibbons poll putting him 20 points ahead of Beers was the basis of an article Aug. 9 in the Review-Journal, complete with a graphic showing what Gibbons' campaign adviser said was a widening gap in the race. The Sun did not publish the findings.

The same article reported the results of another poll, commissioned by Carson City conservative activist Chuck Muth and conducted by automatic dialing. It put the race in a statistical dead heat.

Last month the paper cited internal polling from Jim Gibson, the Democratic candidate for governor. Not surprisingly, it showed Gibson up by 9 points just two weeks before early voting began. He lost by 17.

To avoid just that kind of reporting, small newsrooms have pooled their resources with other media to produce independent polls, says Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute for journalism.

The Review-Journal's polling company, Mason-Dixon, has drawn fire locally from both sides of the political aisle, most notably for a statewide poll it conducted for the paper during the 2004 presidential election. That poll gave President Bush a 10-point lead two weeks before the election. He won by just 2 points.

Last week a Mason-Dixon poll published in the Review-Journal put Beers within 10 points of Gibbons. The final gap was 20. Mason-Dixon accurately predicted the outcomes of other races, however, including the Democratic primary for governor.

Wednesday, Mason-Dixon managing partner Brad Coker defended the poll, saying that most undecided voters - about 9 percent of those polled - settled on Gibbons on election day. The results, he said, fell within the poll's margin of error - plus or minus 5 percentage points for each candidate. (Add five to Gibbons, subtract 5 from Beers, and it covers the 10 percent gap.)

Even so, no pollster relishes an outcome stretched to the limit of the error margin. It doesn't look good. Because either the race took an unlikely turn in favor of one candidate exclusively, or the poll was off.

"We've been polling for the R-J for 14 years," he says. "I can't think of any instances where we were wrong. And if we were, it was within the margin of error."

Regarding the use of partisan polls, Review-Journal Editor Thomas Mitchell says his newspaper does not have a "hard and fast" policy. He says that reporting the results of them helps draw contrasts to research by Mason-Dixon.

"We try to give readers enough information to make their own informed decision," he continued. He says the newspaper does ask about method, margin of error and other vital elements required to evaluate outside research, but does not insist on seeing the original poll.

The Reno Gazette-Journal also reports campaign polls and does not have a firm policy about their use, says senior editor Mark Lundahl. It does make the sources of the polls clear to readers, he says.

Regardless, the days of confusion in Nevada may be coming to an end.

Long considered a red state, Nevada traditionally hasn't held much interest for national pollsters, who tend to work in states considered to be "in play," says Pincus, of The Los Angeles Times.

But given recent demographic shifts here, Nevada's red is shifting toward blue. Republicans are still in the majority, but the more the Democrats close the gap, the better the prospects that independent outside pollsters will begin surveying in the state.

"Nevada is changing," she says. "It's getting harder to rely on the old models."

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