RALEIGH – Ferrell Guillory, the former Raleigh News & Observer reporter and columnist, now directs the Program on Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Not just because I’m an alumnus of the school, I’ll commend to your attention the latest edition of North Carolina data-net, a newsletter published by Guillory’s program and produced by students at the J-School.
The topic is the proliferation of public polling in North Carolina.
I emphasize the first word because political polling is hardly a new ingredient in our state’s political stew. As host to some of the nation’s most competitive and colorful Senate races over the past three decades, North Carolina has been surveyed many, many times by some of the top political pollsters in the nation – some working for candidates and parties, some working for news organizations.
What’s new is the ready availability of frequently updated survey data on the North Carolina electorate. The trend began several years ago with the arrival of the Civitas Institute on the Right and Public Policy Polling on the Left. As part of its mission of promoting citizen participation in state and local affairs, Civitas commissions a monthly live-operator poll of likely voters, asking them a series of general and specific policy questions. More recently, Civitas has added Survey USA’s automated polling to its survey mix, a lower-cost technology that has allowed Civitas to probe voter sentiment in key congressional and legislative districts.
While Civitas is a conservative think tank with a polling program, PPP is a for-profit polling company that conducts surveys both for public consumption and for private clients, including candidates. PPP uses an interactive-voice response (IVR) system, similar to Survey USA’s, that allows the completion of a large number of interviews at a low cost. As a result, PPP has become a ubiquitous source of survey research on political races not just in North Carolina but across the country.
Liberals and Democrats often accuse Civitas of a bias. Conservatives and Republicans do the same for PPP. Both groups receive flak from their ideological allies, as well, when surveys come out that present surprising or inconvenient facts. Defenders of Gov. Beverly Perdue recently took PPP to task for polling and related commentary suggesting she wouldn’t be an asset to Democratic candidates for the General Assembly this fall.
In reality, careful students of recent North Carolina politics have discovered that both Civitas and PPP produce survey results that are reliable, informative, predictive – and often similar. Both groups appear to play it straight with their numbers, even if one might disagree with the way certain questions were worded or which races and issues were polled.
In the data-net newsletter, UNC students profile Civitas, PPP, and other polling operations that have been active in recent North Carolina politics. If they’d asked me ahead of time, I might have suggested that they print more than a couple of paragraphs about Scott Rasmussen, another practitioner of IVR polling, since he got his start right here in North Carolina. Back in the early 1990s, Scott resided in Charlotte and served as chairman of the John Locke Foundation. Later, when he started his first polling company, JLF was one of his initial clients. Scott did the surveys for our Agenda ’96 project, which combined poll results and policy recommendations in a briefing book we published for state and local candidates that year.
We’ve continued publishing our Agenda series of briefing books every two years, but we discontinued our Agenda Poll when Civitas make its debut.
Anyway, if you are interested in the growth of polling and its effect on the North Carolina political debate, you’ll enjoy the newsletter. I certainly did.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.