Elections/Campaigns

If headlines are the first thing that readers see and help shape the public’s impression of events, what was the message they conveyed about the mid-term elections on November 7?

A review of approximately 230 front pages the day after the election suggests that the press, increasingly accused of leaping ahead of the news and trying to layer interpretation on events, remained pretty careful this election day. The headlines were reviewed from the website of the Newseum.

To begin with, more than half the papers examined stayed strictly local in their main headlines, not offering any national or federal results. Of the remaining 100, more than half, 51%, gravitated toward the same basic factual headline: “Democrats Take House.”

There were some slight variations. Democrats were sometimes “Dems.” Take House occasionally became “Seize” House (Decatur Alabama Daily) and every so often “Win Majority in House” (Arkansas Gazette) and even sometimes “Clinch” (Birmingham News). But “Take” dominated.

In the Los Angeles Times it was “Democrats Take House Decisively.” In the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, also in California, it was “Dems Retake House.” And in the Riverside Press Democrat they “Snared” the House.

Only a third of the headlines examined tried to offer some whimsical or rhetorical spin on the results—something along the lines of “Kings of the Hill” (San Bernadino Sun) or “Big Day for Dems” (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle), “Big Victories” (San Francisco Chronicle) or “Power Shift” (Miami Herald, Orange County Register and Santa Rosa Press Democrat).

But the clear winner when it came to headline flair this year, at least in this sample, appeared to be puns involving the word blue.

There were various “House of Blues,” (the Bakersfield Californian and the Colorado Springs Gazette among them.), and at least one “Blues Fest,” (Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa). West Hawaii Today went with “America Votes Blue.” The Indianapolis Star offered “Blue Streak.”

One paper referenced three meanings of the word to include the Democratic victory, the blue theme for the party, and the fact that Democrats rarely win anymore. It was the New London Day in the Connecticut and “Once in a Blue Moon.”

Just two of the 100 papers studied punned with “It’s D-Day.”

And one paper, Newsday in Long Island New York, referenced Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) becoming the new presumptive leader and first woman speaker of the House, with “It’s Her House.”

The verdict from this quick snapshot might be two-fold. First, there is a remarkable similarity in the thinking of front-page headline writers across the country. And in an age when the headlines people remember most, such as “Dewey Beats Truman,” are the ones that are mistakes (The New York Post declaring that Kerry had picked Gephardt as his running mate is a recent example), there may be some refuge to sticking to safe facts well in evidence.

One of dominant phenomena in media coverage of politics is the proliferation of polling. As technology has exploded, the number of news outlets has expanded, and with it, so has the number of pre-election polls.

The polls can become a powerful lens through which reporters, pundits and editors shape coverage. Sometimes, stories can seem as if they were designed more to illustrate what the polls are showing than they are to explain what the candidates did or said.

How did the media polls do this year?

The final vote tally shows that Democrats won the popular vote for Congress by a margin of about 7 percentage points. An estimated 52% of citizens who cast ballots for the House voted for a Democrat, while 45% voted a Republican and 3% went for a third party candidate or didn’t vote for a House candidate.

Normally, as election day gets closer, the pre-election “generic” or national vote survey results tend to converge as undecided voters make up their minds and people settle on their final choices. This year, the opposite happened. In the last weekend before election day, the surveys got further apart, not just sowing confusion among pundits and creating anxiety among the pollsters, but probably creating public doubts about the validity of the polls. CNN’s survey showed a 20 point advantage for Democrats. The Pew Research Survey for the People and the Press had the narrowest range, 4 points.

So who was right? The polls that came closest were USA Today/Gallup poll at 7 points, and the ABC News/Washington Post poll, at 6. The Pew poll was next closest at 4. CNN, which formerly used Gallup, was furthest off at 20, followed by Newsweek (16) and Time (15).

The average of all the polls the final weekend came in at 11.5%, off by just under 5 points.

And no news organization or polling operation missed the overarching trend since they all predicted a victory for the Democrats.

As for the media exit poll, the one that asks voters as they leave polling places who they voted for and that proved so unreliable in the last three election cycles, there were no similar embarrassments on election night. Maybe that’s because news organizations exercised caution before using exit polls to call close races.

The verdict then on the media polls? This year, perhaps people will have to grade on a curve.

The question of when networks project elections, and which network jumps first, is a matter closely watched in media circles. The news organization first off the mark can win viewers who want to know who won before they head off to bed. Yet if a broadcast network or cable news channel calls a race too soon, and has to pull it back, history shows that is an embarrassment, not a point of pride.

This year’s mid-term elections made the projection chase more difficult. Many of the races that would determine whether control of the House and Senate changed hands were close enough that the final numbers had not come in by the time the networks were handing off coverage to local affiliates at 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

As the clock wound down, NBC and its cable sibling MSNBC moved first, at 10:57, just three minutes before signing off on the East Coast. What’s more, their projection of 231 Democratic seats to 204 Republican came with somewhat curious caveat, a “margin of error” as they put it, of plus or minus 10 seats. That meant the Democrats, by NBC's count, could hold the House by as few as seven seats or as many as 47. Call it a cautious projection.

It is not unusual once one news organization moves for others to quickly follow. ABC’s projection came just one minute later. CNN was next, at 11:08 p.m., followed another minute later by CBS.

Fox News held out the longest, till 11:18.

For the five TV news organizations, this was the best they were going to do on this election night. It was clear by then that forecasting the Senate was not going to be possible—at least before the East Coast went to bed. Some correspondents were already talking about a recount in Virginia. At least one analyst on Fox was making analogies to the Florida recount of 2000, when several networks called the presidency wrong, an evening that is not remembered as one of the finer nights in the history of TV election coverage.

For years, the exit polls conducted by the news media were considered one of the modern marvels of opinion research. Rather than asking people what they might do, the exit polls involved more than a thousand interviewers scattered throughout the country asking people leaving their polling places what they had already done--specifically who they voted for and why.

The polls not only proved remarkably accurate. They also gave journalists, academicians and politicians a strikingly clear picture of how the American electorate felt and the reasons behind those sentiments. It was an invaluable tool for understanding the democratic process and, if they wanted, a clearer direction for those with the responsibility of governing.

In the last three election cycles, however, the once-vaunted exit poll began to prove faulty--in part because the razor thin electoral majority began to expose growing weaknesses in the poll. After being consolidated from three exit polls--one for each TV network--into one, and then suffering further cutbacks as the networks saw their audiences and profits dwindle, in the last three election cycles exit poll problems have resulted in disasters of various magnitudes that confused viewers, embarrassed the networks, and called the whole process into question.

In 2000, the combined media exit poll originally showed that Al Gore was going to win Florida and most likely, the White House. But after 37 days of deadlock and a Supreme Court ruling, both Florida and the election officially went to George W. Bush.

In 2002, the computer system handling the data from the exits crashed, and the poll never was fully completed.

And in 2004, early exit returns showed Democrat John Kerry was on the road to a big victory. The numbers were wallpapered all over the Internet. Democrats went home and turned on the TV preparing to celebrate the official returns. Again the winner was George W. Bush. The polling model, it turned out, was marred by flaws again.

What are the plans for 2006? The National Election Pool (NEP), a consortium of media groups, will be exit polling again on Tuesday, trying to get a read on how people voted in the 2006 midterm election and why. There are changes this year, and the NEP promises the problems have been fixed. Interviewers, for instance, have been trained better and will be more closely supervised.

There will also be a new attempt to fix another recent growing problem – early leaks of exit poll results, often partial or early samples that by themselves mean nothing. While consortium members don’t reveal those results—at least those reflecting who is winning—until after the polls close, a number of web sites have leaked early results in recent years, especially bloggers. One concern is that prematurely released exit polls may depress the turnout of voters who haven’t yet headed to the polls and who think the election may already be resolved.

To halt that practice, NEP promises that exit poll data for this election will be housed in a windowless and ominous-sounding “quarantine room.” The few reporters allowed to enter will be stripped of cell phones and blackberries not allowed to call anyone until after 5 pm. Will that stanch the leaks? No one can be sure.

But some of those involved in that practice on past election days told us they are less inclined to do so this time around.

For intance, Slate magazine made a point of publishing the exits in past elections. But in an email to PEJ, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg said that “given the effort to keep them secret until at least 5 PM, I think it's likely to be a moot point this year.”

Jerome Armstrong, founder of the political blog MyDD, which posted the exits in 2004, also sounds less than enthused. “I doubt I would release them, simply because the weight of traffic from having released them first in '04 crashed MyDD for the rest of the day repeatedly, as a million people tried to log onto the website,” Armstrong wrote in an email. “I don't put much weight in them either, and don't view it as a loss that they will not be reported on before the polls close.”

The bigger issue, however, probably involves the methodological problems that have plagued the exit poll in recent election cycles. Why is it that they have missed the mark so badly, and how certain is it the problems have been fixed?

For starters, exit polling has always been full of potential pratfalls. If polling is an art form, exit polling is an art form practiced in poor weather under daunting circumstances, polling professionals told us. There are, as with all polls, questions of the sampling of respondents and the wording of questions, particularly when it comes to why voters cast their ballots the way they did.

But exit polls add more potential for human error. “It’s logistically more complicated because it’s face-to-face and interviewers are spread around so they can’t really be watched closely,” said Diane Colasanto, a former president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research and a former exit pollster.

Another problem is the number of voters who will simply decline to be interviewed—specifically because they don’t want to be part of an exit poll—potentially skewing the survey sample and the results. “It’s not a question of lying to interviewers,” Colasanto told PEJ. “Every person you talk to could tell you the truth and the numbers could still be wrong,” if certain types of voters are more inclined to decline talking to exit pollsters than other groups. This isn't as much of an issue with pre-election telephone polls. In those instances, people are usually refusing to talk before they even know what the poll is about or that it relates to politics.

An analysis by the NEP of the 2004 election found that several factors probably contributed to the poor data – everything from bad weather in some areas to distance restrictions imposed upon interviewers by election officials. The NEP analysis was delicately worded, but it also suggested some of the interviewers may have been too young and improperly trained.

Is that problem fixable? Yes, said Joe Lenski, co-founder and Executive Vice President of Edison Media Research, one of the two polling organizations that conduct the exit polls for NEP.

In a recent interview with Andy Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, Lenski said the NEP has “put together new recruiting guidelines, new training guidelines, a new training video, a new training call, a kind of quiz to make sure that after the training the interviewers retain the most important pieces of knowledge with interviewing rates being one of those most important pieces of knowledge.”

Will all this be enough to guarantee that election day 2006—and the reporting of it—will go smoothly and accurately? It will help, says Colasanto. But nothing is foolproof.

“I think the numbers will be better and more accurate, but you’re never going to get 100% of the people to cooperate,” she told us. “And even though everyone remembers 2004, there have been problems with exit polls in the past.”

By Dante Chinni, PEJ