Essay: DO POLLS HELP DEMOCRACY?

LEADERS must know what their people are thinking. If France's Charles de Gaulle or Columbia's Grayson Kirk had followed that simple rule, they might have saved themselves a lot of grief. Therein lies the chief justification for opinion polls. Yet there is also something vaguely troubling about the polls, those incessant readings of the U.S. voter's psyche.

The classic demagogue swayed the crowd through oratory. Polls sometimes suggest a kind of demagogy in reverse: the crowd seems to sway the politicians through the polls. One expects those who seek high office to speak out with courage and conviction, to teach the people, to lead. Instead, the candidates seem increasingly guided by pollsters—semivisible oracles who claim to know what millions of U.S. voters think and feel. How many Americans have ever talked to a pollster, or even seen one? Yet, pollsters have acquired huge and growing power.

In varying degree, polls account for the biggest surprises of this surprising election year. George Romney dropped out of the presidential race because his private polls showed him losing badly to Richard Nixon. Robert Kennedy dropped in only after his polls convinced him that he could beat Lyndon Johnson in the California primary. In renouncing a second term, Johnson was influenced by a Gallup poll showing that only 26% of the people approved his handling of the Viet Nam war.

During the months ahead, the polls will be more important than the primaries. While Kennedy must surge ahead in both to capture the Democratic nomination, Hubert Humphrey's best hope of braking a Kennedy bandwagon is to continue outpolling all other Democrats. In re-entering the Republican race, Rockefeller has become the first presidential candidate to base his campaign almost wholly on polls. He can win the nomination only if national surveys convince G.O.P. regulars that Nixon will lose in November. But those surveys now put both Republican contenders ahead of all Democrats—and if that reading continues, the regulars may well stick with Dick.

All this raises obvious questions about the role and relevance of the pollsters. Do their samplings really reflect public opinion or create it? Are they scientists or self-fulfilling prophets? Do they enhance democracy or menace it?

America Is a Bowl of Beans

The present phenomenon of polling arises from the politicians' ancient need to know what the public thinks. Finding out was easy in the days when strong party machines relayed the information. Today, the weakening of political allegiances has disrupted communications. Polls have partly bridged the gap.

The pollsters rose to fame and influence on the basis of two celebrated debacles. During the 1936 presidential campaign, the old Literary Digest ran a mail poll and was wrong, while three more scientific pollsters were right. Those three—George H. Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley—conducted interviews among a predetermined mix of ethnic, income and age groups that seemed representative of the U.S. population. The other turning point was in 1948, when the pollsters again used this "quota system" of sampling—but were wrong. The U.S. had become so complex that picking just the right population mix was too difficult.