By the 1970s, advances in polling technology permitted presidential campaigns to gain a better understanding of the impact of specific issues on smaller segments of the electorate, originating with Nixon’s in-house team of pollsters hired to gauge the public mood on the issues of the day, directed by Professor David Derge. Not surprisingly, instead of developing a campaign message to appeal to the widest cross-section of the electorate, campaigns developed the ability to develop tailored messages for specific segments of the electorate. By the 1980s, the proliferation of polls, particularly those run by media organizations, placed presidential campaigns in a difficult situation. Moreover, the establishment of the Cable News Network (CNN) gave birth to the twenty-four-hour news cycle. The constant reporting of frequently conducted polls that ensued meant that candidates, to maximize their standing in the polls, had to develop strategies to quickly respond to fluctuations in the polls.
During the Campaign of 1988, polls showed Republican nominee George H. W. Bush behind Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis by double digits by midsummer. Many political experts believed Dukakis would have little difficulty defeating Bush in November. Yet by early September 1988, Dukakis found himself running neck and neck with Bush, and by early October, Dukakis had fallen behind. Between July and October 1988, the Bush campaign had launched a massive, wedge issue-focused media campaign that attacked Dukakis for his support for a prison furlough program, painted Dukakis as unpatriotic for opposing a law requiring public school students to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and characterized him as anti-environment for the pollution in Boston Harbor that persisted while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts. Even though many political pundits did not regard these issues as particularly important to the future of the country, they proved remarkably effective in influencing public opinion.
During the Campaign of 2000, Republican George W. Bush and Democratic nominee Al Gore were running neck and neck in the polls throughout the race. Neither the Bush campaign nor the Gore campaign proved successful in identifying a wedge issue that had the ability to move poll numbers. During the campaign, for example, Bush attempted to attract moderate voters by expressing his strong support for education reform, and by calling himself “a uniter, not a divider.” Yet the polls remained unchanged. The 2000 election ended with Gore winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote to Bush when the U.S. Supreme Court halted the controversial Florida recount, which effectively awarded Florida’s electoral votes, and the White House, to Bush.
During the Campaigns of 2008 and 2012, the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, seldom enjoyed more than a slight lead in national polls. Despite this, Obama managed to win both a majority of the popular vote (the first Democrat to win a popular majority since Jimmy Carter in 1976—President Clinton falling just short of a popular majority in his 1996 reelection—and the first presidential candidate to win a majority of the popular vote in two elections since Ronald Reagan) and a comfortable victory in the Electoral College in both general elections. During the campaign of 2012, Republican contenders for their party’s nomination held substantial leads in national polls prior to the first caucuses and primaries, dissonant to the final outcome.
While polls continue to command the attention of serious presidential candidates, some campaigns are going still further, supplementing what the polls reveal with other sources of data by harvesting data on other variables within the electorate, such as consumer habits. According to recent reports, the campaign efforts of Republican senator Ted Cruz are attempting to tune into a more varied and expansive pool of data, and it is unlikely that this is a unique example. However, as Eitan Hersh, in a Monkey Cage interview with fellow political scientist John Sides, has explained, reliance on data beyond the actual polling numbers is unwarranted given the complex nature of the data gathered, which may obscure voter motivation as easily as reveal it. Critics of poll-driven campaigns argue that it leads to campaigns focusing on issues able to attract key voting blocs rather than dealing with the most pressing domestic and international problems facing the country. Some political analysts blame the press for creating pressure on political candidates to be responsive to the polls. They point out that instead of focusing on the differences in issue positions between the candidates, media coverage focuses almost exclusively on the standing of presidential campaigns in the polls.
See also Horse-Race Campaign Coverage; Microtargeting
Getlin, Josh. “Regarding Media: For Whom the Polls Toll—The Candidate Who’s Trailing.” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2000, p. E1.
Hersh, Eitan. Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Patterson, Thomas. Out of Order. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Sides, John. “The Real Story about How Data-Driven Campaigns Target Voters.” Monkey Cage. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/07/01/. Accessed September 25, 2015.