Should Bush Be Reading the Polls?

PRINCETON, NJ -- We have a great deal of data about the American people's views on Iraq at this point, but it's unclear just how much attention administration leaders are paying to it.

President George W. Bush went on record a week or two ago saying that he wasn't going to decide policy based upon focus groups. I assume by "focus groups" he meant public opinion (and polls) in general. Bush said this when asked for his response to the massive anti-war protests around the world.

Bush is also on record for saying, in his 2000 campaign, that he would "not pay attention to public opinion."

Of course, nothing in this world is absolute. While Bush himself may not pore over poll results, there is little question that his chief political advisor, Karl Rove, spends a great deal of time reading and analyzing polls. The Bush White House also has a pollster, Matthew Dowd, who is frequently quoted regarding what current polling is saying about American public opinion. So there is little question that poll results in one way or the other filter into White House thinking.

But, there's an interesting question here that goes beyond how much the White House pays attention to public opinion about Iraq: How much should the president be paying attention to polling?

This is not a new question. Pollsters are often confronted about the appropriate use of their poll data by elected decision makers. This is part of a very long-standing debate on exactly what the function and role of public opinion should be in helping determine the decisions of leaders in a representative democracy.

We can't resolve that debate here, but I think it's useful to lay out some of the background.

Most of us know that the early constitutional structure of the United States -- the world's most famous example of democracy -- included a number of barriers between the views of the common people and actual political decisions. The Founding Fathers were quite skeptical about the value of public opinion. The Founders were concerned about not only the passions of the public on a day-to-day basis, but also the "fluctuations," "violent movements," and "temporary errors and delusions" of public opinion.

So, the United States was developed as a representative democracy in which the primary focus of decision-making belonged to a body of elected representatives and a chief executive who served as surrogates for the people -- making decisions in their stead. The Founding Fathers were concerned that even the representatives might be too susceptible to the whims and passions of the multitudes. So they isolated the upper chamber of the legislative body, the Senate, by giving Senators long, six-year terms, and by removing these Senators from direct election by the public (until 1913, state legislatures elected Senators). The Founders also isolated the president from the masses with the creation of the Electoral College, the group that actually elects a new president.

Some of the rationale for this system was based on the Founders' distrust of the wisdom of the people. Another reason was practical. There was no easy way to assess the views of millions of people spread out from New Hampshire to Georgia on anything like a regular basis.

But one thing has changed radically since the Constitution was written. The practical problems associated with gaining a constant read on public opinion have become far less formidable. The advent of scientific random sample polling means that we have the ability to measure the views of the people regularly and carefully -- something that was essentially impossible 200 years ago.

Look at the current situation. We are seeing a constant update of well-done public opinion polls on the public's views on the situation in Iraq -- published at an almost unprecedented pace outside of an election season. Gallup and others analyze and synthesize the results every few days. There is little doubt that White House polling experts, as well as experts working for Congress and the State Department, can avail themselves of an in-depth understanding of the public's stand on the possibility of war with Iraq -- if they are so inclined.

So we're back to the more philosophic debate on the value of the public's opinion in a situation like the current one. Elected officials, including the president, realize that ultimately they will be subject to the public's referendum on their decisions at the next election. The issue is how much value and importance elected officials should place on public opinion in the days, weeks, and months between elections.

This comes down to the issue of how the representative role should work on a day-to-day basis in a democracy. What has been called the "trustee" model of democracy argues that the elected official is in total charge once he or she arrives at the capital. There they serve, using their personal judgment to make decisions, essentially staying aloof from the views of their constituency until the next election, at which point they are either re-elected, or told to stay home.

On the other hand, the so-called "delegate" model acknowledges the need for a representative as a practical way of handling day-to-day government decision making, but emphasizes that the representative should attempt in all instances to represent the views of his or her constituency as closely as possible.

Most elected representatives claim some type of middle ground between these two extremes. They profess to make decisions as they think best, while keeping what they consider to be close tabs on the views of their constituencies.

That may be what they think they are doing, but elected representatives probably don't reflect the views of their people as closely as they imagine. Monitoring letters and e-mails can easily give a distorted view of what everyone in a district or state are thinking. "Going back to the district" (i.e., talking to constituents back home) provides feedback from only a very small minority of people. In the case of the president, of course, the "district" he represents is the total United States, and it's impossible for him to stay directly in touch with 280 million people.

So that's where polling comes in. Survey research is the only scientific procedure by which we can assess dispassionately what the millions of people who make up our country are thinking and feeling at any given time. And that collective wisdom is well worth considering. If our elected representatives ignore polling data, they are missing one of the most important sources of guidance they have.

Remember, each American has a unique combination of experience and knowledge. Taken together, all of these widely differing perspectives coalesce into a great deal of wisdom and insight.

Different types of knowledge and experience enable individuals to speak with wisdom about different situations. To those stranded on a desert island with only a faulty motorboat, a mechanic's knowledge may be worth 1,000 times the value of a professor's arcane understanding of the federal reserve prime rate. To a group of people traveling down a river in canoes, knowledge of outdoors lore and experience in making a fire and pitching a tent can be extraordinarily more valuable than book learning or historical knowledge. While government professors and reporters who cover the United Nations can have near encyclopedic knowledge of the geography, political background, and leadership of nations around the world, they may have singularly inadequate knowledge of their local school systems, their local sports teams, or the nature of retailing in their neighborhood.

The core principle here is that in many ways, the collectivity of all the experiences and knowledge of a group of individuals allows for a distillation of truth that is more profound than the experience and opinions of a few. And this is what polling summarizes and provides.

So, there is little question in my mind that President Bush should indeed be taking into account what polling tells us about the views of the American public on Iraq. Actually, as I noted at the beginning of this article, I think the Bush administration has been taking polls into account to some degree so far. That's probably why we have seen more efforts to deal with the United Nations than might have been the case otherwise. The public has given the Bush administration a qualified green light on Iraq, but Bush would do well to heed the public's reasons for limited enthusiasm as carefully as possible -- not because it might help him with his re-election in 2004, but because embodied in those reasons is a great deal of accumulated wisdom.