Nation: Where the Polls Went Wrong

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The other lesson of the polling season was that the experts have by no means perfected the questions or the techniques that enable them to predict how undecided or unhappy voters will go on Election Day.

One puzzling phenomenon that the pollsters have not been able to cope with, or even explain thoroughly, is the so-called closet Reaganite. For whatever reason, people clearly voted for Reagan in this election who had said they would not.

Everett Ladd, director of the University of Connecticut's Social Science Data Center, says flatly: "I am 100% certain that there was no 'closet Reaganism' in this election." Other pollsters tend to agree. But there is some evidence that suggests otherwise. Before the election, only 7% of the blacks surveyed by New York Times-CBS News said they were going to vote for Reagan; Election Day exit polling showed that 14% had ac tually cast their ballots for the Californian. But when re-polled by New York Times-CBS News, only 6% of blacks admitted they had voted for Reagan.

If the pollsters are united on one point, it is that they are not solely to blame for misleading the public; the fault must be shared with the press, they say, which has never fully understood the limitations of surveying.

Says Cuff Zukin, poll director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics: "We are overconsumed with predicting what will happen. Polls predicting who is going to win the election are worthless. First, they can be very inaccurate at the time of the election be cause they are only accurate at the time they are taken.

They do not predict the future." Agrees Marquette University Sociologist Wayne Youngquist: "The media want the pollsters to be seers. We want them to do more than they can."

Negative voting, large numbers of undecideds, low turnout — all these factors made polling this year more difficult. Says Caddell: "This is the first election in which the voters didn't really like either candidate much."

Says Ladd: "We need a different methodology of election polling that takes into account the vastly greater flexibility that in the long-term sense characterizes the electorate. We know something breaking at the last minute — and it doesn't have to be something very big— can change results. We shouldn't pay too much attention to the earlier polls."

Yankelovich points out that polls can produce numbers reflecting very firmly held, nearly unchangeable opinions, and can at the same time record views that are "mushy." Along with TIME, he is at work on a new technique that will show which figures are "hard" and which are "soft."

Admits Yankelovich: "Our greatest fail ure was to not point out more clearly that the implications of our data were that great movement could occur."

In the end, as Yankelovich suggests, the main fault of the pollsters in a volatile year was that they did not view their own findings with enough skepticism — and drive the point home much more forcefully.