Nation: In Elections, We Deal with Choices, Not Absolutes

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"The job of the public polls is to determine what a situation is," says Pat Caddell, the President's pollster. "But my job really is to find ways to help change that result. Campaigning is a game where you look for any small edge that could be critical."

Trying to find that edge for Jimmy Carter, Caddell has used some offbeat techniques. During the conventions, he wired up more than 100 "focus group" volunteers around the country with a kind of emotion-revealing polygraph to monitor their reactions to Ronald Reagan's and Carter's acceptance speeches, noting which passages excited them and which stirred no response. But the real key to his operation is almost constant polling, surveys remarkable for their numbers, length and depth.

A typical national poll will question fewer than 1,500 people in the entire country. This week 1,000 people in New York State will be interviewed in person for an hour each. The interviewers have been known to fire as many as 150 questions at each subject. The reason: Caddell is trying for a full understanding of the mind-set of the typical voter, and even more, searching for small clues as to what could change it.

So far, the polling makes Caddell optimistic. Carter, he believes, has one huge advantage: the simple fact that he is the President. "This is my third presidential campaign," Caddell notes (George McGovern signed up as the first client of his newly organized Cambridge Survey Research a few months before Caddell graduated from Harvard in 1972), "and I've been on both sides. I'd rather run an incumbent's campaign than a challenger's, at any odds."

Why? To begin with, says Caddell, voters these days "are both questioning and harsh" about all politicians. "A certain skepticism has been built in over the past half-decade, since Watergate." One result is that voters are extremely dubious about the ability of a challenger to do a better job than even a widely unpopular incumbent.

Says Caddell: "People view a presidential election very differently from elections for Senator or Governor. They take a presidential vote much more seriously. Very few will cast a frivolous vote, a protest vote." And they have difficulty imagining anyone who is not already doing so exercising the power of the presidency. One example: early in the 1976 campaign, when he first worked for Carter, Caddell questioned a group of 100 voters and found that 60% were for the former Georgia Governor. But after they were questioned for half an hour on what kind of policies they thought he would pursue, 10% wound up choosing Incumbent Gerald Ford—because, in Caddell's interpretation, they had trouble visualizing Carter in the Oval Office.