Transcript
Ronald Nessen: Good morning, and welcome to the Brookings Institution. My name is Ron Nessen. I want to welcome you all to this briefing on a post-election survey of voters by Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.
A special welcome to those of you who are watching this briefing on C-SPAN, and also a special welcome to members of the Brookings councils, who are beginning a two-day retreat to hear about the election and the outcome of the election. And if any of you find out what the election outcome was, please let us know.
I've been asked to ask, if any of you have digital cell phones, particularly Nextel phones, to turn them off, because they're causing some interference with our microphones.
First this morning, Andy Kohut is going to explain the findings of his survey. Eleven hundred-thirteen voters were contacted between November 10th and 12th. And as you see from these dates, Andy waited a few days after the election to begin this survey, so there is some reaction to the close and contested outcome in Florida.
After Andy's presentation, there will be questions, comments, and discussion by our panel members:
At the far end, Tom Mann, senior fellow here at Brookings in the Governmental Studies program, a frequent TV commentator. I think these past 10 days Tom has probably logged more TV time than Wolf Blitzer.
And also on our panel, Marty Plissner, former executive political director of CBS News and author of a very timely book called "The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections."
You folks in the audience will have an opportunity to ask questions after the opening presentations, and also those watching on C-SPAN can submit questions to Andy Kohut and the panel by e-mail. The e-mail address is: communications@brookings.edu.
Finally, the full Pew Research Center survey that we're talking about today is available on the Brookings website, www.brookings.edu. Also, a full transcript of this event will be on the website. You'll find three earlier Pew surveys and transcripts of those earlier events, along with a lot of other information, background on the campaign and the election, and aftermath. Again, the website address is www.brookings.edu.
And with that, I will turn you over to Andy Kohut.
Andrew Kohut: Thank you, Ron. I am happy to be here.
We do -- we have done a survey of voters on the weekend after the election ever since 1988. This is the fourth in a series of post-election surveys. We did this one more out of force of habit than out of conviction. We didn't know quite what to do, given the uncertain outcome of the election, and decided that we would plunge ahead and see what we could find.
Now, it was my plan to come here to talk to you about the way -- why people voted as they did, and how people felt about the campaign. We decided to stow the post-mortems on why people voted as they did until we really have a political corpse. So I will focus pretty much on the way the voters viewed the campaign; the way they viewed the process. I think that's more appropriate because these opinions may have some bearing on how the American public reacts to the ultimate outcome of the election and the deliberations that are going on in Florida.
As to public opinion about the campaign, there's a big surprise in this poll. Our headline is that voters rated this campaign more highly that they rated previous campaigns, despite the fact that there was an uncertain outcome and -- clearly by Thursday night when we started our interviewing, the respondents that we interviewed knew there was an uncertain outcome -- and yet they still rated, in a counterintuitive way, Campaign 2000 in many ways much better than they did the three previous presidential election campaigns. Let me recite some of these.
First, a larger percentage of voters said that there was more discussion of issues this time; 46 percent said there was more discussion of issues. That's compared to only 25 percent four years ago; not quite as good as the 59 percent who said that in 1996.
Secondly the debates were clearly rated at better than they were four years ago; two-thirds of the people that we talked to said that they found the debates helpful. That's up from 41 percent four years ago. It's not quite as good as the 70 percent who rated the debates as helpful in 1992.
The voters saw less mudslinging in this campaign than they did in both '96 and '92; a 46 to 34 plurality said there was more, not less mudslinging. In 1996 that was -- the percentage saying less was considerably less; 36 percent. And in 1992 most felt that there was much more mudslinging than not in that campaign.
So, on those three counts: discussion of issues, the debates, and negative campaigning, the voters give this campaign generally better marks.
The bottom line is that 83 percent of the people that we interviewed said that they learned enough to make an informed choice between these two candidates. That compares to 75 percent four years ago, 77 percent in '92, and only 59 percent in 1988. So people thought that the campaign was nourishing, and they were able to make a reasoned judgment.
Now it wasn't only the process that voters were more satisfied with; they were also more satisfied with the candidates. Sixty-eight percent said they were satisfied with the candidates. That compares to only 51 percent four years ago, 61 percent in '92, and 62 percent in '88.
Now most people say they were only "fairly satisfied," not "very satisfied," but that is certainly better than "dissatisfied," and there was less dissatisfaction with the candidates in 2000 than there was four years ago.
This doesn't surprise us, because we had been seeing this all along the line. Voters were more satisfied with the candidates. In part this reflects greater Republican satisfaction with their candidate this year than four years ago and even eight years ago. On the other hand, Democrats were somewhat less satisfied than Republicans and less satisfied with Gore than they were with Clinton four years ago. Republicans were clearly much more satisfied with Bush than they were with Dole.
I think that overall this poll is good news for the chances that the next president will be viewed as a legitimate winner. It was a better campaign than most recent ones, say the people. Voters felt better about themselves and about the choice they made, and voters will not bring a lot of negative baggage about the campaign to the judgments that they ultimately make about the winner of this election, whenever we find out who he is. Whatever the problems are with other aspects of the legitimacy question, the campaign won't be that problematic.
Some might argue that in hindsight, when we have a winner and a loser, these opinions may change. I suspect that maybe their attitudes toward the candidates might change as there's more hostility and more polarization about the candidates, but I don't think that opinions about the debates, I don't think that opinions about the way the process worked, the way the campaign worked, will change that much, because we have -- these findings are all fairly consistent with what we had seen at the pre-election stage.
The important caveat to this better opinion about the campaign has to do with the way the American public feels about the press. The improved opinions about the process did not extend to the press. Just 28 percent gave the press grades of A or B. We asked people to rate most of the campaign players with school grades. Twenty-eight percent gave the press an A or B, but 38 percent graded the press D or F. That's pretty comparable to what we found four years ago. And clearly, the press is at the bottom of the list, if you look at our report.
The media miscalls of the outcome of the presidential race on Tuesday surely only intensified voters' long-standing criticisms of press performance in campaigns. Seven in 10 voters voiced anger or disappointment that George W. Bush was prematurely called as having won the presidency. More than half the voters believe the networks' earlier mistake of calling Florida for Gore may have affected how people in other parts of the country were voting. A larger percentage of people in the West said this than people in other parts of the country.
Most of the respondents that we interviewed said the networks rush to judgement are predicated not on a desire to inform the audience, but on a desire to be first. It's no surprise then that this poll says that the media's having -- had too much of an influence on the outcome of the election. Fifty-two percent in the current survey said that, up from 47 percent four years ago and 46 percent eight years ago.
In fairness to the press I should add that polling took the hardest hit in the evaluations of the American public. This time around, 40 percent gave the pollsters a good grade, down from 54 percent in '96 -- I'm sorry, 34 percent gave the pollsters a good grade, down from 40 percent in '96 and 54 percent in '92.
I'm tempted to say that much of this may have to do with the way the voters this weekend felt about the exit polls, as the pre-election polls did a pretty good job of foreshadowing this very close election. But I don't think it was only that. I also think that the volatility in the reporting early in the campaign, I think the loopy tracking polls that were tracking not much, and the overemphasis on the horse race was part of public hostility toward the polls that we observed in this survey.
Finally, on the process: I'd like to share with you how much voters changed the ways in which they got information about the campaign. For the first time in this series of surveys that we've done since 1988, voters cited cable news rather than any other form of television news as the most important source of information about the campaign. Thirty-six percent said they got most of their news -- campaign news from cable news, up from 21 percent in 1996. Only 21 percent said they principally relied on the broadcast networks, down from 36 percent in '96 and 55 percent in '92; a really big difference. Local television also -- fewer people also mentioned local broadcast television as a means of getting news about the campaign. The biggest decline in -- as a source of information however, was newspapers. Thirty-nine percent said they got most of their information about the campaign on newspapers, down from 60 percent -- fully 60 percent in 1996.
It's no secret voters are increasingly going online for election information. Roughly 11 percent said that the Internet was their principle -- not roughly, exactly 11 percent said that the Internet was their principle source of information. Another 19 percent said they sometimes use the Internet for election information, meaning that on total about 30 percent of the people that we spoke to -- the voters that we spoke to -- use the Internet to some degree. The comparable number in 1996 was 10 percent. So, the Internet has grown three-fold in four years.
That's about what we found on the process in this survey. We have a lot of other information that we will release later in the game dealing with how voters reacted to the candidates and their basis for making choices.
I'd like to conclude my remarks, though, with a few words on what to make about the sharp splits in the vote on the exit polls. The polls have found canyon-sized gaps -- the exit poll on Tuesday night found canyon-sized gaps on preferences between -- for Bush and Gore -- between men and women, between blacks and whites, between rural voters and urban voters, between the churched and the unchurched, between pro-choice people and pro-life people, and people who have guns and people who don't have guns. You can go right down the list and you'll see these big, big differences.
Now, a lot has been written about how much this may reflect greater polarization -- greater polarization of the American public. I don't see -- that's not my interpretation. That's not what I take away from this data.
I think we don't have a more divided public, but this election result is a natural expression of the partisan and ideological fault lines that were especially apparent in this election; the traditional partisan and ideological fault lines. They were especially apparent because we had no overarching issues; we had no overarching proposals from -- no big proposals from the candidates; and the candidates were clearly not -- the choice between the candidates was clearly not compelling, especially to independent voters.
As a consequence, what we see in the exit polls and what we saw Tuesday night was the pattern of response that we would see to a generic -- in my view, to a generic test ballot between a Republican candidate for president and a Democratic candidate for president. You will find the similar demographic and ideological splits on that kind of measure in most public opinion polls.
I don't think people are particularly polarized; in fact, if anything, I think they're less polarized, and I support this interpretation with the following pieces of information: First, our longitudinal surveys find more moderate views on issues ranging from trust in government to the social safety net, to views on race, and to opinions about civil liberties. People are less divided on these values and basic attitudes, not more divided.
Secondly, in our post-election survey, still unreported, we find very little negative voting. Most people were voting positively; there wasn't a lot of antagonism here. Thirdly, all of the demographic and issue patterns that I mentioned and others have reported on were evident four years ago. They were somewhat less sharply drawn, however,
The biggest differences this year, and the reason why these patterns were more sharply drawn is that there was a break-even outcome among independents, among middle-class voters, among middle-income voters, and most of the ideologically non-aligned groups, to a greater extent, than was the case four years ago. We split the electorate into two pieces -- those that lean right and those than lean left, and most people don't lean strongly right or left. They're extremely pragmatic.
Views about the use -- many of the issue questions found the public very liberal, while questions about self-assignment -- Do you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative? -- found a balance of the public saying they were conservative. But that conservatism is mixed with support for a range of issues that reflect pure liberalism.
Finally, I think there is a sign of lack of divisiveness about -- in the American public -- in the way people are reacting to the uncertainty in this presidential election. Two-thirds of the American public told the Washington Post that either candidate should accept the recount in Florida, even if they think the voting was unfair. In my view, that is not a public opinion expressed by a polarized public. I think a polarized public would have a very different view of the recount situation. And perhaps my colleagues on the panel will have other comments on that. And I think I'll leave it there, Ron.
R. Nessen: Well, while you're getting seated, I'm going to ask our two panel members whether they have any comment on Andy's report or on the outcome of the election.
First, we'll start with Tom Mann. Tom, it's good to see you, you know, not in that little 20-inch screen, but actually in person.
Thomas E. Mann: Thank you, Ron. Listen, I'm delighted to take part again in the release of a Pew Center survey. We did this twice before the election, and I thought it provided a wonderful opportunity to step back and to gauge public opinion.
It's all the more important now, because of the extraordinary situation we find ourselves in. Marty Plissner was telling me that he had occasion to read the transcript of the Brookings event exactly one week ago, the day after the election, and said the comments made there actually had a half-life longer than six hours, which is encouraging -- encouraging to me.
But at the time, we sensed that we were in the midst of a once-in-a-century happening, a conflation of events that was going to take a little time to work out. And now that a week has passed, I think we can feel confident in that forecast.
I believe the Pew poll presented here today provides a useful backdrop for viewing what's transpiring now. And I want to talk about a couple points in particular on that.
But first I simply want to say that that sort of crisis rhetoric is overdrawn and strained. This is a very, very close election, and given the stakes of the candidates, the parties, and their supporters, it's not surprising that it would take some time to work out.
My own view is that we are moving toward resolution, that it will certainly involve the courts, as I expect today to get word from a circuit court judge in Tallahassee, the Florida State Supreme Court, and the 11th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. And my guess is that this process will not be resolved on Saturday, that we will go forward and ultimately the Bush camp will have a choice of accepting the offer to open a hand recount in the entire state or to live with the results of the hand count in several counties that are overwhelmingly Democratic in nature. And I'm guessing, ultimately, they will accept the former, we will have a count, and in about eight or nine days from now we will have a certification by a secretary of state in Florida that is not subject to challenge by the Florida Supreme Court. But that's just a guess.
The broader point I want to make is that the American public is taking this in stride. Not only that; the American public is intensely interested and engaged in this. I am heartened by the amount of attention being given to this, say, relatively to the O.J. Simpson trial, relative to Princess Diana's death, relative to the other sort of popular-culture stories that have dominated public attention over the last several years. This is really quite extraordinary. And rather than being a sort of terrible situation, it holds the potential for being a marvelous national civics lesson.
But in order for that to happen, we have to have a resolution that is broadly seen as fair, acceptable and that is ultimately accepted by the losing candidate and party. Therefore, there will be a substantial sort of pressure on whoever ultimately is the losing presidential candidate, whether it be Vice President Gore or Governor Bush.
Now, I'd like to pick up on two points that are embedded in Andy's report that I think are very important. One has to do with the public attitudes toward the press, and in particular the network calls. I can't over-emphasize the destructive quality of network election calls in this cycle. The initial call of Florida for Gore was by all accounts based on some erroneous data that moved into a model. But given the partial returns that were available, one might have thought it would have led to more caution in the initial count.
But even more telling was the rush to call, at 2:31, or 2:35 a.m., to flip the call on Florida and therefore declare a president of the United States. Ninety-six percent of the returns were in. It was close. There were Democratic precincts yet to report. Prudence, judgment, would have called or withholding that. And it's made all the more questionable because the initial call was made by Fox and the head of the call desk is a cousin of Governor Bush. There may have been nothing improper, but networks wield extraordinary influence and they have a responsibility. And I think the competitive pressure of the other networks probably contributed to the unanimity in the call. My belief is that created, along with Gore's concessionary call to Governor Bush, a sense of entitlement in the Bush camp that they had won the election, and it has been very difficult for them to drop back into a neutral mode.
At the same time, the revelations about the really innocent, but quite consequential, design of the Palm Beach County ballot and the research done on the impact of that sort of led to a strong feeling by Vice President Gore and his supporters that he had won Florida; that a plurality of Florida citizens went to the polls last Tuesday fully intending and thinking they had voted for him. So you've got sort of a sense of entitlement, on the one hand, based in part on network calls and a concessionary speech, and a belief on the other candidate that he won largely wrapped around the Palm Beach County ballot, which puts us in the mess we're in. The other thing relating to the press, that Andy discusses in this report, is the reaction to the polling. I am very pleased that this sort of polling enterprise is right down there with the press in terms of ratings of performance in this campaign. We just had an orgy of polling. Polls came not to be tools for analyzing news, but substitutes for news, and it was awful. And nothing was more awful than the CNN/Gallup/USA Today polling. That's a long story, but the artificial volatility captured in those polls, it seems to me, had a real impact on the way the race was conducted and how it was covered, and it did no service to the American public.
The final set of points I want to make have to do with this national civics lesson that we are undergoing. I am greatly heartened by the results of the Pew survey on the basic satisfaction with the major candidates that were running, if not ecstasy; with the belief that the campaign was run reasonably well, and that voters ended up getting the information they needed.
I'm actually heartened by American's sort of instinctive belief that, hey, counting in a close election is bound to be complicated, testy, and take a little time. But I'm even more gratified by the seeming willingness of the American people to accept a result that is, by all accounts, imperfect. Alas, humans are imperfect, democracies are imperfect. We do the best we can, and then we accept a result and we move on. And I think there's every indication in Andy's survey and supplementary results, suggesting just that.
Three final brief notes about this national civics lesson. It is amazing to see the interest in, and growing knowledge of, our electoral system. Some of us have long called it the "underside" of American democracy. Most people didn't have a clue about how elections are administered, and they're learning something about it. They're also learning about the electoral college. I believe this civics lesson will be an impetus for considerations of reforms. Now, some of those reforms will fail, and they probably ought to fail. But I think it's time we took a look at the way in which we run our elections, beyond the question of money in politics, which is already front and center in the political system.
I think it's also clear, given the overall results, that this will be a very, very difficult period for governing. It comes hard on the heels of a divisive battle over impeachment. Congress is narrowly divided. We're going to learn something about the winning and losing presidential candidates, about their ability to size up the situation, to play off their intense supporters at an ideological poll with those in the center who will be necessary to govern.
Everything I read in the Pew Center Survey and other research that's been done since the election suggest to me that Americans would take kindly and appreciatively to any such effort to acknowledge the reality that, whatever their campaign planks were, the substance of governing will almost certainly change as a result of these extraordinary results.
Thank you.
R. Nessen: Thank you, Tom. Marty Plissner, the fact that you are a former executive political director at CBS, don't feel called upon to defend the networks' coverage.
Martin Plissner: No, I don't. They're working hard enough on it, with their current personnel.
Okay, speaking third here, I have an awful lot to deal with, having listened to both Andy and to Tom. I want to be more explicit about what I told Andy regarding this event you held moments after the night of the election closed. It's the finest example I've seen of what used to be called "instant analysis" since the days of Walter, Eric and Roger, and they would have been proud to have a demonstration here of their precision and their accuracy.
With regard to what Tom has just said about the civics lesson, I have to tell you about my own 12- and 13-year-old children who have not displayed, until this past week, the least bit of interest in this campaign. I can't tell you how the pieces on the evening news broadcasts about double-dipping and the payroll tax and prescription drug benefits has gone right past them; but the butterfly ballot -- they are experts! I have -- on the steps of John Eaton [sp] Elementary School the other day I heard a dispute. I heard a dispute between fifth-graders which sounded as though they'd both been given talking points by the campaigns.
According to Andrew Tilden [sp], who kind of logs the network coverage, last week had the highest, largest amount of coverage of a political campaign in the past 12 years. And I have to tell you, while Andrew doesn't keep a log of horse race-versus-issues coverage, this was 100 percent horse race. And I have to say, too, that there's every sign that the public is eating it up, regardless of what they tell Andrew; what they ask about which they'd rather have.
Anyway, I studied the tables in Andy's survey last night somewhat closely, and I have just a few remarks, or notes I took down. I found the same lead that Andy did, which is that 83 percent said they'd learned enough to make a choice; a record in this series of surveys. There was more discussion of issues, they said, than in the past, and this is a remarkable finding, given the report in this same room Monday of a record low in issues coverage on broadcast television. Now, this perhaps reflects another of the Pew survey's findings, which is that network TV is no longer the public's main source of information about presidential campaigns. Cable, in fact, is rated far and away the leading source.
Now, this is a finding which I think needs further study, and I've discussed this before with Andy. Twenty-five million Americans, give or take a few, watch an evening news broadcast. Only half a million watch Inside Politics. Nineteen million watched the conventions on the big three; only about 5 million watched it on everything else. Ratings on the debates are fairly similar. In one of Andy's -- part of Andy's survey determined that people felt they had -- that they learned more about the -- that the media had too much influence. Now, which media? Cable?
Anyway, I do think this probably needs a further examination. As far as the polarization of blacks and whites and Hispanics, men and women, pro-life and gun, this didn't seem, when I looked at them in the national surveys of VNS, this did not look all that different from what I've seen in the past. And I think in suggesting that we don't make a great deal of this, as Andy did, I agree with him thoroughly.
I note, by the way, that only one in 10 said they didn't watch the debates. That, too, seems stunningly at odds with the ratings.
Less mud-slinging than in past campaigns. There's no question, I've never seen the candidates insist more incessantly that they wouldn't sling mud, while they privately encourage others to do it for them. It seems to have worked.
And at last I found Pat Buchanan serving a useful purpose; he keeps Andy's colleagues, and mine, from being at the bottom of the heap among those being graded in this survey. The press, as we've all noted, remains at the bottom, as it has since the 1980s, but it's holding steady while pollsters are trending down, down. Until the final week of the campaign, to be sure, when they increased their sample sizes dramatically, this was not one of their less-troubled years. For the first time, they ranked below political consultants. On the other hand, the critics, who four years ago sniffed a liberal tilt in the poll numbers, may have to find a new conspiracy theory. To the relatively limited degree that the final polls and the election day disagreed, the polls, on average, leaned somewhat Republican.
Given the dreadful reviews in the hated media of this year's debaters -- one a dunce, the other a marionette -- it's refreshing to see once again that Americans think for themselves. Four years ago, when both men knew their stuff and neither was entirely bereft of charm, Pew's respondents found the debates unhelpful. This time, by 2 to 1, they give it thumbs up.
And perhaps the most remarkable finding to me was that one in four respondents were bothered by the networks' election night calls. I'm sure those people are somewhere, but I, myself, have yet to meet one of them.
R. Nessen: Thank you.
We're going to take questions from the audience. I'm going to relay some questions that we've received by e-mail from C-SPAN viewers.
First, though, Marty, let me ask you a couple of questions about part of this survey, which you released a couple of days in advance because it was timely. And you found that if Bush is declared the winner in Florida and the electoral college, will he have legitimately won the election? Twenty-seven percent said no. When you asked -- Will we have an accurate count of votes in Florida and other states? -- 42 percent said no, we wouldn't get an accurate count. That seems very high to me.
And one of our C-SPAN questioners, by e-mail, also asks: How can people believe -- this is from Arizona -- how can people believe that the selective Florida recounts are fair when there were ballots eliminated from tabulation in 49 other states?
A. Kohut: I think part of the answer is that people don't -- Americans don't expect perfection in these recounts or in voting. And they feel that at a certain point you have to draw a line in striving to get an accurate recount. And the issue is whether, on balance, is this as good as we can practically do? And I think that's what voters were reacting to in the response to a potential Bush win. Subsequent polls asked the same question about a potential Gore win and found the same answer.
And these polls show a fair degree of polarization by whether you're talking to Bush backers or Gore backers, but very large percentages of each of the opposition constituencies are willing to along with a defeat for their candidate provided that reasonable steps have been made to assure the accuracy of these counts. And I would put the emphasis on "reasonable," not perfect.
R. Nessen: You referred to the Washington Post-CBS poll.
A. Kohut: It was ABC.
R. Nessen: ABC poll. And I was somewhat surprised, along this same line, that in response to a question about Gore supporters, a large percentage of Gore supporters thought that he had lost the election and ought to do what you just suggested, which is to accept the results.
A. Kohut: Well, this may have to do a little bit with what Tom was referring to, the declaration of Bush as president and the extent to which the Bush campaign has played on that strain of public opinion. I think, though, that by and large most Gore supporters want to see this go as long as possible and see it judged as fairly as possible from the perspective of their candidate.
R. Nessen: Marty, do you think there's any chance at all that the networks are going to exercise any kind of self-restraint next time around in terms of basing projections on exit polls, of the winners?
M. Plissner: Well, I think they're going to have to be more careful. The question is -- the issue is not just restraint, but intelligence. I mean, nobody would be complaining at this point if the calls had been correct. And the reasons why they were wrong involved different -- a lot of different things, but the most important thing that was involved was haste.
I mean, when Voter News Service was created 10 years ago, the main goal of the networks that put it together was to save money, essentially. In 1988 they had spent between 15 and 20 million dollars each on doing this. By pooling their resources, they came down to 3 -- or 3 million [sic]. That means a lot in the budgets of a network news division.
Now, one of the trade-offs was the assumption among most of us at the time that we would no longer be able to do what we had done in the past, which is beat one another in making calls first and being able to brag about it afterwards, since they all have the same data, they all have the same estimating systems, the same models, and they all have fairly smart people looking at them. So the only way you can score a beat would have been to lower the risk you're ready to take in making a call.
Now, for two election cycles they didn't try to compete and they didn't make any mistakes. The third time around, one of the networks, whose initials are ABC -- decided to try to beat the system. They brought in their own analysts and they made calls in four or five high-profile non-presidential races -- Ollie North in Virginia, Mario Cuomo losing in New York, a number of the things that everybody was watching all evening as being the star story. And it was a clear beat. Well, nobody was going to stand still for that. Two years later they all had their separate experts and they were all looking at the same data and trying to be first.
Now, as Andy will tell you, in any kind of sampling system there's a level of probability, a level of confidence you can have when you make an estimate. When you see 3 percent, for example, as the sampling error in a poll, that means that 95 percent of the time they'll be within that.
Now when they're looking at the -- when you're looking at the estimates on a network projection -- and this is not just exit polls -- you're going to see a percentage there which suggests the confidence level you'll have. At one point, it will say 80 percent, 90 percent.
When it gets to 99.5 percent on the screen, that's the point where you make a call. That means there's a 200-to-1 probability you're going to be right. It also means if you make 200 calls, there's a chance one of them could be wrong.
R. Nessen: And they got one wrong.
M. Plissner: Now that it turned out to be Florida last Tuesday night was one of those disasters.
R. Nessen: Well, I think --
M. Plissner: There's more to it than that, but that's part of it.
A. Kohut: I wonder if I could make a comment, Ron --
R. Nessen: Yeah, I just want to -- in your survey, you found that an astoundingly large -- 87 percent of the people you talked to thought that the networks ought to wait until all the votes are counted before they announce the outcome.
A. Kohut: Yeah. I think that if people realized that they might have to wait a very long time, that percentage might come tumbling down.
But in point of fact -- so in point of fact, you have to have a good system for doing some kind of forecasting. And VNS is a good system.
The problem here with the networks, Marty, is not only did they save money by combining and making -- only having one, rather than three; they haven't upgraded this system. This system remains what it was and the way it was developed in the 1970s and '80s -- in fact, by CBS, your old unit. And it operates -- they didn't put more money on it. They're saving money by dividing the cost in three, and they didn't up it to make it a Tiffany operation.
M. Plissner: Yeah, this is absolutely true. I'm not sure -- I'm not sure that anything they would have -- any amount of money they spent would have enabled them to catch the poor entry in Duval County.
A. Kohut: But part of it is lack of quality control. They don't have a quality control system. We won't get into the technicalities --
M. Plissner: Yeah. No, no. Sure, no, you're right. I'm -- of course.
A. Kohut: But one other thing: The reason why these people are making calls is not because the American public is there banging on the door. "We want to know about Florida!" They're doing it for -- with a sense of machismo media. "We're going to get -- you know, Fox made the call! We got to make the call!"
M. Plissner: Right.
A. Kohut: This is not in keeping with what people are really concerned about.
M. Plissner: It's important also to know too that -- I'm not disagreeing with any of this, but -- what Andy said is exactly right. But it is indeed machismo. It's an ego trip by the news people. I mean, it isn't as though the share price of General Electric or Time Warner will be affected to a penny by whether they were first or third in making a call in Florida. I mean, this is not a matter of big corporate profits thinking; it's -- as Andy says, it's machismo.
R. Nessen: Sounds like a lot of alpha males in the newsroom. Is that what you're saying?
M. Plissner: Absolutely. That's -- you got it. You got it.
R. Nessen: I just want to go to the questions from the audience, but first, one question, Tom. You referred to this perhaps bringing about an impetus for reform. And one of the questions we got from C-SPAN viewers by e-mail asks the question, "Do you believe that the Electoral College selection will remain intact?"
T. Mann: Yeah --
R. Nessen: So what reforms do you think will be spurred by this, and is the perhaps elimination or reform of the Electoral College one of them?
T. Mann: Probably not. That is, the odds of doing away with the Electoral College are relatively small, given the fact that three-quarters of the states have to ratify a constitutional amendment, and I think at least that many states feel they have the potential of greater influence in a presidential election within the Electoral College than with the national popular vote.
On the other hand, I think we are going to return to this question. We're going to have a national discussion and debate about it, and that's all to the good. Let me remind everyone that I think the odds are pretty good within a week to ten days we will have the outcome of this election in a timely way for the electoral college result to go forward.
If we had a direct popular vote, I could make no such promise. It could easily stretch beyond the deadlines that are now built into the process. We would have calls for vote recounts in scores, if not hundreds of localities around the country. So don't imagine that eliminating the electoral college is any panacea to the particular problem. In fact, I would argue the least of the problem is the potential divergence between the popular vote and the electoral vote. People, by and large, accept this. It's true nominally they give support to a direct popular election, but they understand the rules were played according to the electoral college and they'll live with it.
I think actually there are some changes that could be made. For example, eliminating the electors and just having the votes automatically registered. Again, that's not a big problem. We've had nine faithless electors over 200-plus years of electoral college history.
I think, rather, the bigger questions are going to the nature of the ballot and the balloting, which gets us into the administration of elections. And here Ron, I think we are about to launch a major effort in this country; exploring this, realizing there is a difference in the constitution. The states are given, in the case of both congressional and presidential elections, the right to determine the manner and place. But alas, Congress can overrule them in congressional elections, but not in presidential. So we might make a move to allow more uniformity in the manner of voting for federal office holders and certainly some reallocation of resources to upgrade these systems for administering elections.
M. Plissner: I disagree with almost all of this.
T. Mann: Well, finally we get some conflict up here.
M. Plissner: First of all, the great issue to ordinary Americans as opposed to people like us, I think, is whether they guy who comes and gets the second-largest number of votes should become president? I mean, that's something people understand. And if you ask them about that, whether in Andy's or anybody else's survey, it's two-to-one that the guy who gets the most votes should be president. That even a third of the people would answer that -- astonishes me. And my guess is if you conducted a poll in Montana, or in Hawaii, you get exactly the same result. I don't know if anybody has.
R. Nessen: But the question is, do those people in Hawaii and Montana know they will never see a presidential candidate again?
M. Plissner: They don't anyway. They don't now.
A. Kohut: Well, Hawaii and Montana maybe, but --
T. Mann: Well, let's pick New Hampshire or Maine.
M. Plissner: Well let's -- now we're getting to it.
T. Mann: Or Iowa.
M. Plissner: Well, now we're getting to another freaky system that ought to be gotten rid of, and will some day when anything as clearly wrong as the man getting the most votes not becoming president would be. When something like that happens, people react; they feel strongly about it. And the issue here is not whether it'll be easy or harder to count the votes. I mean, that is really a secondary matter. I mean, the question is, when you count the votes in a manner that will be judged fairly, who's going to get to be president?
It's already clear that no matter how you count the votes nationally, Gore will have the most. So the question at this point is how you got the votes in Florida, and whether anybody would really think of trying to do it in one or two other states, which aren't nearly as close, in which the other side knows a recount wouldn't change anything.
My expectation is that by the year 2004, we will not have a winner-take-all electoral college system. And one of the things that means in the context of this discussion, which is network calls, that the traditional procedure during election night of watching votes come in, while looking at sample precincts to determine which candidate has 25 votes in Florida, is going to be done; it won't happen. The only thing that will have any relevance in making a projection will be national surveys, and I think that is probably what you're going to be looking at.
And that raises a whole list of new questions. But I think to start reexamining the mistakes made last Tuesday -- and they were enormous -- to figure out what you have to do next time to make sure it doesn't happen again, are not going to relate to the situation that you're going to have to deal with four years from now in an election which I think will be conducted on entirely different rules.
T. Mann: Thirty seconds, Ron, just to underscore the fact that we really do disagree on this matter. I think there will be come impetus for reform debates, both to eliminate the electoral college; debates within states to change their rules for allocating electoral votes from winner-take-all to some kind of proportional system. But let me tell you, once that debate ensues, the public is going to have another civics lesson about the extraordinary complexity involved. It's not a simple matter. Because it will encourage third parties, independent candidacies. We will increasingly have plurality elections. Is 35 percent enough to elect a president, or are we going to build-in sort of instant run-offs, preferential voting? Are we going to have actual run-offs? This is a very complicated matter, and nothing is inevitable about 2004.
But the bottom line is while the public nominally prefers direct election to electoral college by a 2 to 1 majority, at the same time, they are prepared to accept the results of this election if there is a divergence in the results between the two.
M. Plissner: Of course. We are a nation of laws, God bless us, and they know what the law is. But that doesn't mean that they think this is the law that should be applied. And if there's an alternative, my guess is that there will be a great deal of support for that alternative, even in Montana.
R. Nessen: All right, I'm going to go to questions from the audience. If you have a question, raise your hand; you'll be recognized. Identify yourself, stand up, and wait for the microphone to come.
This gentleman on the aisle.
Q: I'm Mark Gruenberg from Press Associates. We're a news service here in town. Two things lead me to ask about the validity of the reliance -- which media voters relied on in the Kohut survey.
There was a huge increase in turnout, especially in key states such as Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, in minority voters. There was an enormous increase in voters in labor union and labor-related households -- 26 percent of all voters. Yet those voters in those two groups got their information from places other than TV, cable, Internet. I'm curious as to why your survey doesn't reflect that.
A. Kohut: I don't think that one follows from the other; that if there was indeed increased turnout in these sectors, that the sectors that turned out don't use cable news is -- it doesn't follow -- one doesn't follow from the other.
As to the larger point that Marty was making about why, when we had these big events such as debates or the evening of the election, why do we have the networks doing very well yet most people say they rely mostly on cable, because most of the time during this campaign, cable was where the action was, and if you wanted political news, you got it from cable, not from network. It was hard to find on network, particularly in the drought in the period from the end of the primaries to the conventions.
And this is an attitude question, it's not a behavioral question. And the debate about it is very much like the debate that began in the 1960s, when the Roper organization first asked this question, and we found most people saying that they were turning to television rather than newspapers. And there was this great alarm from newspaper people saying, "Well, what do you mean? Our sales aren't down that much."
So I think that you have to recognize that looking at individual snapshots of what people were watching at a particular point in time and what they say they principally rely on are two different things.
There was another point I wanted to make, but --
R. Nessen: Does it bother you, Andy, that particularly among voters under 30, but even in the larger population, people are saying that they get information to make up their mind about who to vote for from Jay Leno, David Letterman, "Politically Incorrect," "Saturday Night Live" and so forth?
A. Kohut: Well, I don't know if, from a civics point of view, that's the best thing, but they're not only saying that. They're saying they get it from other sources as well. In fact, that's the point I wanted to make.
If you step back and you look at this survey and others like it, you come away with there is no longer any one dominant source of information about election news. Information about the campaign seeps in from a variety of ways -- networks, cable, local, the Internet -- and the dominance of the networks is a thing of the past. And I think that's incontrovertible.
R. Nessen: A C-Span viewer in New York City has e-mailed a question about overall turnout.
T. Mann: Listen. By the conventional measure of turnout, we seem to have gone up a bit, from roughly 49 percent in 1996 to 50.5 to 51 percent in 2000. Now, if we were to use an accurate denominator -- that is, if we were to eliminate non-citizens and felons ineligible to vote -- we would find that number above 55 percent. What I'd say is it's between '92, when Ross Perot stirred up a lot of interest, and '96, which was a low point in contemporary elections.
A. Kohut: But closer, Tom, much closer to '96 than to '92.
T. Mann: That's right.
M. Plissner: Let me add a point to that. I ran into Curtis Gans, the pope of his particular kind of doctrine, and I asked him about the turnout as he calculated it. And he said 51 percent, the number that Tom just used. I said, "By the way, we're hearing a lot about spoiled ballots and ballots being thrown out right now that are suddenly being looked at." Now, these were cast by people who obviously took the trouble to go to the polls and cared enough to go to the polls." I said, "How many of those are there, do you think, all together around the country? There are so many in Palm Beach County."
He said, "Oh, about 2 or 3 million." Now, if you add to your numerator the people who voted but didn't get them counted, you're now talking about, like, 54 percent.
A. Kohut: Yeah. And then you'd subtract from the denominator --
M. Plissner: Right. I wound up with 59 percent, which begins to approach those magical numbers you hear about from such democracies as Ukraine -- and to which we're being compared with so much contempt.
A. Kohut: One more comment on turnout. I'm not so sure that we know the levels of turnout by certain groups. The assertion in your question may not have been absolutely correct. VNS changed the categories of union members. The gun ownership question is different. It's not really clear where the increase from 49 to 51-1/2 came about. I think it's become the conventional wisdom that there was a much higher union vote, and there certainly was in Michigan, but it's not necessarily the case nationally. I think that's a story yet to be written.
M. Plissner: I'll bet you there isn't.
R. Nessen: Other questions from the audience? Right there.
Q: Yeah, hi. Darren Gersh with Nightly Business Report. I'd just make one comment as somebody who has worked in control rooms of newscasts. I learned very quickly that if you didn't give people the news quickly and first, they went elsewhere. So I have the feeling that it's not just alpha males in control rooms, which is why they're all trying to be first.
But I also wanted to know what your thoughts were. You've been talking a lot about how the electorate is not as polarized and how they're accepting the results, but all the analysis I've heard -- especially, Tom I want to know what you thought about this -- is that when all is said and done, the partisans will be in control here in Washington and that the expectation is the next two years they're just going to be chewing each other up. It's going to be nastier than ever here. Is there any reason to believe that that won't happen, based on what you're saying here and in this poll?
T. Mann: It is absolutely true that the greater the intensity of, and degree of involvement and interest, the more polarized ideologically and the more intense one's partisan attachments are. So it should be no surprise that people in Washington who live politics, are elected by it, tend to cluster at the ideological poles, tend to have the sharpest partisan feelings and, therefore, that the prospects for governance are complicated.
Having said that, it's important to note that in each of the three elections since 1994 the sentiment and orientation of new members has tended to lean more toward the center than the ideological poles. So we're gradually -- this is both because of the people who are coming, the nature of their campaign experiences, and the Zeitgeist in the country -- the feeling about wanting Washington to work and people to get along. So it seems to me we are beginning to repopulate the center in Washington, and this election and the uncertain result over these days, in my mind, contributes to centrist advantage and strategic position in governing.
Does it mean that we'll all get along and live happily? Of course not. Does it mean, though, that a sort of creative, resourceful and courageous president can use these ingredients to try to fashion a government different than one he imagined when he was running for president, the answer is, yeah, he's got a shot at it. But it won't be easy to initiate and it'll be extremely difficult to sustain.
M. Plissner: Okay. It should be observed, however, to the extent that you see partisan polarization already shaping up here in Washington, it is not over issues, it is not over ideology. It's over the usual thing, which is spoils. Right now, the only argument going on between the parties -- and Congress is in session right now -- is over how they're going to divide up the chairmanships and subcommittee chairmanships if, as seems quite possible, the Senate next year is evenly divided. That is the kind of issue that Congress really gets excited about. The others can all be negotiated quietly in back rooms, and I suspect that's going to happen.
R. Nessen: Other questions from the audience? Yes, sir.
Q: Miles Benson with Newhouse Newspapers. I wanted to pursue again for a moment the question of turnout. At this stage after an election, there's always a paucity of information about turnout. You know what proportion of the vote was black, and what proportion was union and what proportion was men and women, but I'm curious as to what's knowable and what the obstacles are to knowing the proportion of eligible voters in the various groups actually went to the polls. What's knowable, and when will we know it?
T. Mann: It's very difficult because, of course, the richest data set is that done by CPS, the Census Bureau, and that relies on self-report, and it's greatly inflated. I mean, we can get some demographic estimates of sort of demographic differences in turnout, but we can't rely on that for actual turnout. We have to sort of reconstruct the numerator and denominator. When it comes to groups like union households and union members, we have an exceedingly difficult time.
I do think we will be able to say what proportion of those who voted on Election Day are in what categories and how does that compare with past elections, although, as Andy says, it's complicated by changes in question wording.
I think the evidence suggests there has been a steady increase in the union household participation in U.S. elections. The increase estimated by the exit polls seems to be three percentage points this time, from 23 to 26. In individual states it seems to be larger. Michigan is the one that seems to be the outlier, 44 percent union households. It's a sort of extraordinary turnout.
We don't see anything approaching that, as best as I can tell, in changes in the composition of the electorate due to turnout. Maybe my colleagues think we'll get some better information on this in the weeks ahead.
A. Kohut: I don't think that the census information is very useful, since the over-reporting is so great. We will put out a little information, but our surveys are limited by size. I think what you have to do is you have to make some inferences based upon what the exit polls show.
And the problem here brings us aback to this earlier discussion. There's only really one exit poll, and that exit poll has, as most surveys, has some soft parts to it. In fact, if you compare the only other -- there's really two exit polls. There's an exit poll done by the Los Angeles Times. If you begin to compare the LA Times national exit poll with the VNS exit poll, you get some substantial differences -- for example with regard to party affiliation. And I'm not convinced that the demographic data that you have in the exit polls accurately reflects the demography of the vote, because a lot of the exit polls depended on people who are willing to check off -- to do a self-administered questionnaire. And there may be some biases in this that we can't account for. I think we are were much -- I will say it one more time -- we were much better served when we had three exit polls, not one or one and a half.
T. Mann: Andy, just a question about this. There's such a large, and increasing, percentage of people who cast absentee ballots, and the state of Oregon, that do vote by mail, and, of course, the early voting periods, where the exit polls can't pick those up on Election Day. All of this has to be picked up in supplementary surveys that presumably are then integrated with the exit polls. How confident are we that the final results we're getting from VNS adequately incorporate the non-Election Day poll site voting?
A. Kohut: I don't know the answer to that. At NPR we were thinking about whether to buy Washington as an exit poll or not, and a lot of the early vote is telephone. So, whether this is well done, who knows? I mean, let's not just jump all over VNS.
T. Mann: No. But --
A. Kohut: They're very competent people.
T. Mann: But they strive to include all --
T. Mann: They strive to include all of this, but it's an increasingly difficult problem, with early voting and mail voting.
M. Plissner: I would like to suggest that if, by any chance, I'm right and we do have a national vote for president in 2004, the chances are, I would think, in that case that you would see a restoration of individual national election poll surveys. This happens to be the cheapest part of the whole Election Night projection system. And if that were the main thing you were going to be looking at, all the networks could afford to do their own; and, I imagine, would. That would be a relatively minor advantage of having a popular vote for president.
R. Nessen: You know, Marty, you've become a real optimist since you left the networks. We're going to amend the Constitution in four years, and the networks are going to have three exit polls. Wow!
M. Plissner: Most amendments go through in either a year or two, or not at all.
R. Nessen: Well, let me follow that up with two questions that have been sent by e-mail -- two related questions. One is, what effect, if any, on voters waiting to vote in the Panhandle of Florida did the initial call that Gore had won Florida have?
And related to that is another e-mail question, saying, "In order to avoid any manipulation or influence on potential voters on Election Day, why shouldn't the media be forced to withhold all calls on the voting until all the polls are closed?" Marty?
M. Plissner: The -- first of all, you have to understand at what time the voter in -- this supposed voter in Pensacola, who still hasn't made up his mind about when to go to vote, would have found out that -- if he was listening to NBC, that Florida had been called for Gore. The polls closed -- it closed uniformly in Florida at 7:00 p.m. local time. Now that meant that in the Panhandle -- let's say in Pensacola, if you -- the polls closed at 6:50 p.m. Eastern Time. The -- that means 10 minutes before the polls closed, you might have heard the call about Florida being for Gore. You would then have had 10 minutes in which -- you would have to have been waiting for the last 10 minutes to go to the polls, in order to make that decision. You would have to have heard the call, and you would have to have been totally uninterested in the very tight race for Senate that was going on in Florida.
Now remember, 80 -- 75 percent of the people who voted in Florida on Tuesday voted in 1998, when there was no presidential call. The number of conceivable non-voters produced by that call in Florida, I suspect, is zero. But maybe it was three or four or 10. I mean, this is not a credible factor in what the -- in the vote count we're hearing there, from there.
R. Nessen: And the idea of banning networks from making calls?
M. Plissner: That's -- well, the thing is, you know, long before there were exit polls, long before there were exit polls or sample precincts or county models, you had -- in the year 1948, the Chicago Tribune had to decide whether it was going to --
R. Nessen: Whether Truman or Dewey won?
M. Plissner: Right.
M. Plissner: Now if there's anything an experienced Illinois political reporter knows, it's what kind of margin you need to have in Cook County to carry the state. Well, at about midnight, the votes for Cook County were in, and Dewey had enough votes in Cook County to carry the state, assuming a normal pattern of downstate voters.
The folks at the Tribune noticed that Dewey was leading in Ohio at that point, that he had all the electoral votes he needed, and then went up the famous headline "Dewey beats Truman."
At this point, at NBC, H.B. Kaltenbourn is being informed by the Associated Press that the Chicago Tribune has gone to press declaring Dewey the winner. He reports that and, as a result, becomes the subject of a famous sound bite by Harry Truman.
Now is that any different from the blunder which took place a week ago at the cost of tens of millions of dollars and all the brain power and research that was being done? It really isn't.
So as I say, nothing is going to stop people -- reporters using whatever intelligence they have to indicate how a race seems to be going, and banning exit polls wouldn't make any difference.
T. Mann: Just a word. I agree completely with Marty on the Florida panhandle situation. The early call affecting them was deeply offensive in principle, but absolutely irrelevant in fact.
You can't force the media, just given the First Amendment. We have two ways: One, shaming them into better behavior, and many people around here are involved in that unending struggle. The second is to change the electoral system that complicates their task. You can have an election weekend, with uniform poll closing times, maybe except for Hawaii -- that's a little complicated, Andy. You could pull that off, but of course you would have exit polls being leaked around and sort of stories being written. It's very hard to get around this problem.
M. Plissner: I don't know how you deal with -- [word inaudible] -- Magazine either.
R. Nessen: Other questions from the audience.
This gentleman in the first row.
Q: I'm Jim Dickson from the National Organization on Disability. I wonder if the panel could comment on VNS' and the networks' refusal to identify people with disabilities in the exit polls. In 1996, we know there were 11.3 million of us who voted.
R. Nessen: Andy?
A. Kohut: I have no comment because I am not privy to the writing of that exit poll. The space on those questionnaires are negotiated between the four networks and the Associated Press, and that's the process by which the arguments over what's to be included are made, and I have no insight for you, Jim.
M. Plissner: I have a little. I mean, it's a good idea. I mean, I've been on these survey -- these question surveys. And I have to suggest if somebody had suggested it, I would have thought it was a pretty good idea, as I do now. But I don't know whether since '96, which is the last time I had any input into this, the idea had actually been offered and rejected. It certainly wasn't when I was there.
Q: It was offered and it was rejected.
M. Plissner: When?
Q: Starting with a year ago October.
M. Plissner: Oh, okay. I have no knowledge of that.
R. Nessen: Yes, sir, this gentleman here.
Q: I'm Al Millikan, Washington Independent Writers. My own initial personal reaction to the survey, it seems to me there's a lack, maybe an avoidance, of any questions or issues of truth and morality, ethics, integrity, character. And I'm wondering if this is a result or an after-effect of the reign of Bill Clinton and his influence on all of us. And even when you bring up something like mud-slinging or negative campaigning, it seems like the way it's -- the implication I'm getting is that the question is whether this should be done or not, or whether this is good or not, not whether the mud or the negativity is truthful or accurate.
A. Kohut: I would urge you -- or I would remind you that there is a good deal of the survey that is unreported that deals with voters' motivations, what was behind the vote, and issues versus personality and character, and things like that. And we thought it appropriate to hold that information till we're past this resolution of who the actual winner is. So I don't -- I mean, there's a good deal in this survey that we haven't written about yet.
Q: Are doing some review at this point, or are you deliberately withholding that?
A. Kohut: Well, I think you can look at the exit polls in that regard and you can get a good answer to that question, and it's very much a mixed answer.
With regard to the mud-slinging response, I mean, people were, I think, responding to the fact that they saw the principal candidates very reluctant to attack one another, and they liked it.
R. Nessen: Somewhat related to that was a finding that you had that was somewhat startling to me, that only 29 percent of the people you talked to thought that the campaign commercials were helpful to them. It wasn't too many elections ago that Patterson and McClure came out with their finding that a lot of people found out more about where the candidates stood on the issues from paid political commercials than they did from news coverage.
A. Kohut: Well, I think -- a couple of things. First of all, I think these surveys show that people increasingly say that the commercials are not helpful. When we asked these questions in 1988 -- excuse me, Ron --
R. Nessen: Sure.
A. Kohut: -- 38 percent said they were helpful, compared to 29 percent.
Secondly, I think the clutter of commercials -- the number of commercials, particularly in the areas where there was a saturation bombing, so to speak, create real difficulties for voters. I mean, they're bombarded with this stuff, and they reject a lot of it. And I would say that the effectiveness of commercials in races down the ticket, in terms of informing people, are probably higher than they are with regard to the presidency. And I'm not so sure what those studies referred to, whether it was presidential voting or congressional voting or what.
T. Mann: Ron, another possible explanation is that many voters saw no commercials, at least relating to the presidential election. Many major media markets had zero commercials relating to the presidential election. So it's not surprising.
The other thing is there really has been a change in the nature of campaign advertising, that the candidates, for the most part, are the good cops and the parties and the bad cops. And the candidates provide sort of -- actually pretty useful campaign information, and the candidates -- the parties run the so-called issue ads that tend to be, sort of, very contentless and harsh, and attack in character. And maybe the increasing role of that party-based issue advocacy advertising has a bearing on what your results are.
M. Plissner: It is ironic, by the way, that it's the issue advocacy ads in which most of the mud is flung these days.
T. Mann: Right. No issues in issue ads.
R. Nessen: The gentleman there in the middle.
T. Mann: Andy Glass.
Q: I'm Andy Glass. I work for Cox newspapers and followed the election on the Internet. Your report on the sharp increase in people who are getting their information on the Internet is one of the most interesting parts of your survey.
I wonder if you would comment on the fact that it is both qualitative and quantitative in nature -- that is, people who followed the election carefully on the Internet on election night were able to look at exit polls more or less in the same real time as the analysts who we've traditionally relied on to interpret this information.
What does that, in the opinion of the panel, augur for the future of election coverage in general; the fact that people can be their own analysts and are no longer restrained by network filters or even cable filters?
A. Kohut: I think that there's a real potential for more engagement among the people who are really interested. We have, in the field right now, the end of a tracking survey that we have been conducting each night, about how the American public has been using the Internet to follow the election.
Now, we planned to end this on Wednesday following the election, but inasmuch as it's not resolved, and there's still a lot going on in the Internet, this survey keeps going. But suffice to say that the people who are really interested in campaigns are -- this is a great trove of information and resource -- the amount of -- I've looked preliminarily at some of the results. The amount of communication that people are doing with one another about the campaign is really pretty impressive. And whenever this ends, our surveying will end, and we can tell you much more about it, Andy.
T. Mann: Andy, the Internet is a godsend to political junkies and to the political class broadly defined; that is, people out there in the country who really care about these matters. We get information on a timely basis. We don't have to wait for Sam Donaldson to tell us what we should think about this. So it's wonderful.
But the real question is, How quickly will this class grow? You know, we're talking 5 percent, 10 percent max, with a generous definition. When will it get to 20 and 25 percent? Here's my hope: This national civics lesson we're undergoing now in this post-election period is captivating the attention of the entire citizenry, including the youngest cohort that has been the most disengaged from politics and public affairs, but who also are most likely to make use of the Internet. So, query: Will the two come together and dramatically increase the attentive political class? Let's hope so.
R. Nessen: I was struck by the same thing that Andy Glass was, of the really sharp increase in people who listed the Internet as a main source. In '92, you found that the number was so small it wasn't even applicable, and in '96, 3 percent; now 11 percent -- almost quadrupled, really. And yet the Internet is an unmediated media. There's no editor or producer there. Everybody's his own publisher. Everybody's his own producer. Do you have any sense of how much impact that kind of raw information pouring through had on the outcome?
A. Kohut: I'm not so sure it's all that raw, because if you look at where people are going, they're not going directly to -- they're mostly going to news sites. I mean, they're going to CNN or they're going to ABC, and they're just getting more -- more information -- granted, sufficiently more information that they could potentially form different opinions from what the pundits are saying. But there's less going to original sources than going to news sites.
R. Nessen: They're not going to the candidate's own websites or to the anti-candidate website?
A. Kohut: And when they do, they rate these sites as not very useful.
R. Nessen: Other questions from the audience? Any final thoughts? Well, thank you all on the panel, thank you all in the audience. I think we gained a lot of useful information. Thanks to the C-SPAN viewers who sent in their questions. We tried to get as many of those answered for you, also.