Nation: Watching a Campaign the Way You Watch a Movie

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He is the guru of the modern political campaign, the ex pert who pinpoints which voters a candidate has the best chance to woo and what image and issues might win them. Yet the art and emi nence of the candidate's pollster have flowered so recently that there are only four or five pros at the top of the trade.

Among them: Reagan Strategist Richard Wirthlin and Carter Adviser Pat Caddell.

Their differences go well beyond the fact that Wirthlin, 49, is old enough to be the 30-year-old Caddell 's father, and is known in the business, to his pleasure, as the "grandfather "of the modern pollsters. Wirthlin is a sedate family man and former professor of economics at Brigham Young University who speaks cautiously, befitting his responsibilities as Reagan 's chief strategy planner. Caddell, on the other hand, is a voluble, black-bearded bachelor who turned pro in 1970, working for Governor John J. Gilligan of Ohio while still a Harvard undergraduate, and can be startlingly candid about his chiefs political problems. But Wirthlin and Caddell agree in sizing up the election: close.

Using Wirthlin's computer bank, an assistant can call up information on the political behavior and preferences of some 110 categories and subcategories of potential voters, ranging from the numerous and obvious (conservative Republicans) to the small and obscure (Roman Catholics who consider themselves "born again"). One sample: people over 65 who have incomes of $25,000 a year or more favor Reagan over Carter better than two to one, and their turnout at the polls is extraordinarily high—87% in a typical election.

Wirthlin began building up his mass of data—currently called PINS (Political Information System)—in 1968 when he conducted his first polls for Reagan, who was preparing to run for re-election as Governor of California. In the years since, Wirthlin has been expanding the bank steadily, adding dollops of census data and studies of voting history to the results of his own polling. In the latest survey, finished just before Labor Day, Wirthlin's agents interviewed 7,000 people, five times the size of the typical Gallup or Harris sample, investigating not only overall preferences but trends in key states and voter reaction to major events.

An equally important element in Wirthlin's system is a technique called tracking: constantly repelling small groups of key voters to catch developing shifts in opinion. Says he: "Tracking allows you to watch a campaign almost the same way you watch a movie."