Douglas B. Harris

Governing with the Polls

INTRODUCTION During the 2000 presidential campaign and the early years of his presidency, President George W. Bush purported to be a politician who was not interested in public opinion polls. As part of this image-making, Bush presented himself as different from his predecessor, President Bill Clinton, who was known as a consumer of polling data and was portrayed as unusual in this regard. President Bush’s team also meant to evoke an image of Bush as a leader who set out his own path to presidential achievement regardless of public sentiment. Yet the Bush administration used polls quite a bit, developing language to promote its policy agenda. For instance, under President George W. Bush, one rhetorical move generated by opinion researchers was the refiguring of the estate tax as the “death tax.” By the same token, the narrative about President Clinton both disregarded cases of him acting contrary to the polls and overlooked the decades-long practice by previous elected officials to govern with the polls. In fact, the use of quantitative public opinion data in politics and government dates back to the 1930s. During this decade, electoral campaign strategists, administrators in government agencies, and presidential advisors gathered and used information from polls. To be sure, during these early years and beyond, citizens and legislators voiced their suspicion and dislike of polls. However, as polling for politics, academic analysis, and market research grew over the decades, public opinion studies became increasingly common in government. By the turn of the twenty-first century, bureaucrats and politicians in the United States were governing with the polls.

Let’s Play Hardball

The Machiavellian aim of “gaining and holding power” by winning a majority of legislative seats is a key aim, arguably the primary purpose, of legislative parties (Kolodny 1998). To be sure, legislative parties also play important roles in building legislative coalitions, passing policy, and organizing the chamber, but each of these legislative roles hinges on gaining or maintaining majority control. In this respect, contemporary parties fit well Anthony Downs’ definition of a political party as “a team of men [and women] seeking to control the governing apparatus by gaining office in a duly constituted election” (1957, 25). Still, what it takes to win enough offices to control the legislature has changed significantly in the last half century, particularly as Congress became more polarized in the post-Reagan era.