Some fear polls are playing too big a role

WASHINGTON - When a widely publicized poll showed Republican John Kasich with a 10-point advantage in the Ohio governor's race, aides to Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland fought back hard.

Against the poll.

"With just two weeks until Election Day, it is our opinion that the Quinnipiac polls are irresponsible, inaccurate and completely removed from the reality of the Ohio governor's race," the campaign said, noting that other surveys were showing a far closer contest.

The Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, an organization with an unchallenged reputation for nonpartisanship, responded mildly. "We stand by our numbers and our overall record for reliability," said Doug Schwartz, the organization's polling director.

The flare-up underscored a widely held view among both politicians and pollsters that polls, once used largely to help a candidate shape strategy, increasingly affect the outcome of political campaigns in the Internet Age.

Candidates and their allies instantly disseminate bare-bones results, seizing on those that reflect well on their prospects, ignoring the rest and skipping over details that caution people about reading too much into them.

"They can affect contributions," said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster not involved in the Ohio governor's contest. "They do affect news coverage in a substantial way. They can affect volunteers. They can affect [voter] interest, and through all those things can affect the outcome" of a race.

Democratic complaints this year are sometimes dismissed as sour grapes in a campaign trending against them. But Republicans, too, express unease about the proliferation of polls.

"There's a great deal of frustration with media polls, which I don't think spend the kind of money to do this the proper way," said Rob Jesmer, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

According to HuffPost Pollster, 26 polls have been released on the Strickland-Kasich race since Labor Day by 13 organizations. An additional 22 surveys cover the Illinois Senate race, 21 a three-way Florida Senate contest, and 20 the contest in Nevada.

As in Ohio, many produce startlingly different results within days for reasons that go unexplained in the daily communications battle of modern-day campaigns.

"The public has an absolute right to be skeptical about any polling information" that doesn't include detailed material, said Richard Czuba, whose Detroit-based firm, Glengariff Group Inc., does survey work for the Detroit News and WDIV Local 4.

Jesmer's suggestion that not all polls are equal hints at the complexities involved.

Demographics - making sure a survey reflects the views of a proper mix of men, women, older and younger voters, Republicans and Democrats - are critical to producing a poll that is reliable. A pollster's decisions on which respondents are likely to vote also are key.

Professional pollsters also differ on another big issue.

Most if not all firms that work for candidates and the major parties, as well as Quinnipiac and some other organizations, use live phone operators to ask questions.

Other well-known pollsters such as Rasmussen, Public Policy Polling, and SurveyUSA Research rely on automated calls, in which an individual who answers the phone responds to a series of recorded questions by touching the appropriate number on the keypad.

Automated calls are cheaper, but a debate flourishes about their reliability.

"I am a firm advocate of live operator telephone calls," Czuba said. "For one thing, you know who is on the other end of the call. If you are doing operator calls, you can screen out the 13-year-old who thinks it would be fun to go along and say, sure, they are eligible to vote."

"We were formed to give people a lower-cost polling option," said Tom Jensen, the head of Public Policy Polling, and he and others defend surveys done by recording.

Pollsters also must make decisions about which people are likely to vote. Firms use different techniques to sift "likely voters" from the rest.

"The frustrating thing is that various levels of credibility are given to various polls, and you just don't know the demographics of some of these things," said Aaron Pickrell, Strickland's campaign manager.