In his unsuccessful bid to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz last fall, Beto O’Rourke tried a variety of unorthodox campaign tactics. He live-streamed himself cooking a chicken in his kitchen. He was perfectly fine dropping profanity into public remarks. And he promised Texas voters that he would not hire a pollster to guide his campaign.
“My heart’s in it, I want to do this, I’m driven to do it. I’m not poll-testing it,” said O’Rourke in early 2017 as he launched his campaign. Though O’Rourke was not successful, the pledge to eschew polling lives on. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, having moved firmly into the top tier of Democratic presidential contenders, has also opted against hiring a pollster.
Why skip on the survey research? Polling, while not an inexpensive line-item, is usually far from a large portion of a campaign’s budget. Instead, the benefit of loudly and proudly going pollster-free is about the performance of authenticity. “I am not a focus-group tested, blow-dried candidate,” claimed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in the 2014 wake of the Bridgegate scandal, despite the fact that yes, Christie did in fact employ pollsters on his campaign. (I conduct focus groups a lot, and I can assure you, I’ve never seen a focus group participant say that they would like a candidate to be “blow-dried.”)
Voters, understandably, do not like the idea that politicians are just telling them what they want to hear, or that someone running for office is so hungry for power that they’ll say popular things in public while privately believing none of it. People would like to vote for candidates with honesty, integrity, and a willingness to stand up for what they believe in.
But the notion that having a pollster on your team is antithetical to being an honest candidate of strongly held beliefs? Nonsense, built on the myth that most of what pollsters do is tell candidates what to think and to feed them magical words and phrases to hornswoggle voters into going along. Pollsters are generally not telling candidates such as Christie how he should style his hair.
Being a pollster myself, I feel obligated to push back against the increasingly prevalent idea that our work is only valuable to candidates who are looking to be told what to think.
Typically, when someone decides to run for office, they have a general idea of what they’d like to do with the office they seek. They might not have deeply thought-out policy positions on every single issue under the sun, but they have some guiding principles and priorities. A pollster’s job, in large part, is to identify what parts of that candidate’s worldview resonate most and with whom they resonate. It’s not about telling a candidate what to think, it’s about figuring out where voters’ views and the candidate’s most overlap (and where a campaign is going to need to do more persuasion work to win the argument).
If there’s an issue that matters a lot to voters, it’s good for those pursuing elected office to be well aware of what concerns voters would like to see them address if elected! There’s nothing virtuous about running a campaign that focuses only on the issues you care about, voters be damned.
Polling and focus groups also can make sure that what a candidate thinks they are saying is what voters are actually hearing them say. We’ve all had instances in our personal lives where we have said something to a friend or family member and were surprised by their negative reaction — “Wait, I didn’t mean it like that!” — because we had no idea that we were inadvertently making our own view unclear. There’s nothing inauthentic about making sure your meaning is clear and that you’re not accidentally alienating someone who agrees with your fundamental point. Opinion research can help catch any potential landmines you might never have thought of on your own. (You know, like being a wealthy white man launching his presidential bid by saying “I’m just born to be in it” while appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair, and then being surprised by the backlash.)
In the popular imagination, pollsters are out there telling candidates to flip-flop away from their core views in search of votes, or to spin unpopular positions into gold with magical catchphrases. (“Don’t call it defense spending, call it FREEDOM INVESTMENTS!”) And to be sure, there are plenty of politicians who give the impression of being empty vessels just waiting for polls and focus groups to fill them with popular positions to hold.
But pollsters who are truly doing their job are in the business of helping candidates explain their authentically held views most effectively, and encouraging them to focus on the issues people truly care about.
Campaigns shouldn’t hire a pollster to swoop in and tell their candidate what to think. Thankfully, that’s not what pollsters actually do.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and author of “The Selfie Vote.”
