RALEIGH – Did anything worthwhile ever arise out of spite?
It would be great if the answer to that question was “no.” It would bear out of the wisdom of the ancients, the teachings of the prophets, and the admonishments of Sunday School teachers everywhere.
The truth is a bit different, however. Throughout human history, plenty of worthwhile ideas have gotten their start from emotions such as annoyance, embarrassment, envy, or rage. All human beings experience these emotions every now and then. The trick is not to wallow in them.
Annoyed that another company keeps winning the contracts you bid for? Channel that frustration into an innovative cost-saving idea. Embarrassed that the other kids are doing better in math than you are? Channel that shame into a request for extra tutoring. Feeling a bit envious of the financial success of a neighbor? Rather than covet his possessions, or blame someone else for your fate, channel that emotion into developing a new product or service that people will readily pay to obtain.
According to a piece at Talking Points Memo, Raleigh businessman Dean Debnam once felt spite towards me. Well, okay, perhaps not me personally. But about a dozen years ago, Debnam says, he was angry at the polling the John Locke Foundation was then commissioning – and how much attention our polls were receiving in the North Carolina press.
“I was fed up with reading basically BS in the local paper as if it was fact,” Debnam told TPM.
(Of course, I disagree with Debnam’s characterization here. Only rarely did the Raleigh News & Observer report our Brilliant Surveys as fact. But I digress.)
So Debnam decided to do something to combat JLF’s pervasive influence. He founded Public Policy Polling, a frankly Democratic outfit that uses automated technology called interactive voice response (IVR) to produce a large number of opinion surveys at a fraction of the cost of live-operator polls.
As it happens, the John Locke Foundation’s first polling contractor was Scott Rasmussen, then a Charlotte-based business who pioneered the use of IVR polling in the mid-1990s. I doubt Debnam knew that. But regardless of why he chose to base his new firm around the technology, it proved to be a wise strategic choice.
I guess I’m supposed to dislike and distrust PPP because of its origins and ideological leanings. But I don’t. Over the years, I’ve found its horserace polling to be at least as predictive of the final outcome as the more-expensive establishment firms. Often, PPP outperforms them.
I even enjoy some of PPP’s cheekier questions about the likes of sports events, religious matters, and political conspiracies. Unfortunately, this is not an area where the company plays it straight. While PPP has draw favorable reviews from the Left for reporting that sizable minorities of Republican-leaning voters believe in birther theories and other nonsense, I don’t recall the firm doing any comparable work on the wacky ideas of sizable minorities of Democratic-leaning voters.
Other pollsters have. As I have previously observed, there were at least as many Democratic truthers who believed George W. Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks as there were Republican birthers who believed Barack Obama was born outside the U.S.
Another problem is that while Debnam complains about the wording of questions posed in surveys by the Civitas Institute, which took over the Right’s polling portfolio some years ago, PPP sometimes slants its own questions on controversial issues. As I told the TPM reporter, the drafting of poll questions is an art, not a science.
It is particularly difficult to write a “neutral” question about a complex issue about which many people have either mixed views or no clear view at all. You have to decide what information to include without making the question too long. Not surprisingly, conservatives and liberals often disagree about what information is indispensable.
Still, as a conservative who also regularly consumes political polls, I think it’s great that PPP, a nationally recognized firm, is located right here in North Carolina.
Would it make Dean Debnam explode in spite if I even claimed a little credit?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.