A Pollster's View of Election 2000

11:03 A.M. EST

MODERATOR: Happy New Year, everyone. It's nice to see familiar faces. This is actually, I think, our first briefing this year. And it gives me great pleasure to introduce -- reintroduce an old friend of the Foreign Press Center and, indeed, of anyone that follows American politics and elections, the so-called Prince of the Pollsters, Mr. John Zogby, who is the president and CEO of Zogby International.

Today Mr. Zogby is going to do a process and results analysis of the recent elections. And I'm glad to see that there are so many gluttons for further punishment in the audience -- not to hear John's always sage remarks, but just to think about what was, for many, a strange and painful period.

And after that, he will take your questions. I think he'll call on the questioners himself. I presume we have at least one working mike. And please wait until the mike reaches you, and introduce yourself by name and organization before you ask your questions.

If you have cell phones or beepers, if you could shut them off, I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Thank you, John.

MR. ZOGBY: Thank you. It's nice to be back.

I'm mindful of the fact that if I had not done so well polling this election cycle, I probably would not have been back again. And I suppose that your colleagues are -- most of them are probably in Florida for all the right reasons now, as opposed to all the wrong reasons in November.

I want to talk a little bit about the polls as a process and how prominent the polls were during the pre-election and then even more prominent, especially in the form of the exit polls, in the post- election, and then -- these are all -- these will be very brief remarks -- and then, finally, a look at the meaning of the election and what I think ultimately happened and what it all means

So first of all, the polls as process; and let's look at the pre- election polls. Throughout the campaign, it seemed to me, and I was hearing this quite a bit, that the polls, the public opinion surveys that were taken were as big a story as the election itself. Now, some of that had to do with the fact that you really did have two lackluster candidates and not a heightened public interest. And so other issues, other extraneous kinds of forces, might find themselves to be more interesting than the candidates themselves.

But on the other hand, I think the polls themselves became such a story because there were so many of them. I go back to the 1960s and '70s and even up until the election in 1984; in the United States, there was the Gallup Poll and the Harris Poll and then that was it, and that's what folks looked for. And the polls taken by Gallup and Harris were taken every month and then weekly as you got into October and then, perhaps, a bit more frequent as you got closer to the election.

But in the 1990s and culminating with the 2000 election, what you have is really a proliferation of polls. I mean, among the major polls, let me just cite these: Reuters and MSNBC -- that was my poll -- and CBS, New York Times, the NBC Wall Street Journal, ABC, Washington Post, the American Research Group, Fox News, the Battlegroundvoter.com Poll, the Pew Research Poll, the Marist Institute Poll, Newsweek, Princeton Research Associates Poll, Time- Yankelovich (sp), the Rasmussen Portrait of -- and so on. There were just a lot of polls out there, and we were coming out, not monthly or weekly; we were coming out with polls daily, in the closing weeks of the election.

Why so many polls? I think there's a number of reasons. Contrary to the gut reaction that you might have, people are interested in polls. They are interested in being connected. They want to know if the candidate they support is the candidate a majority supports. Or, they want to know if the issue that they identify with is the issue that the majority identifies with. As they develop opinions and develop support for a candidate, voters simply want to know if they are -- how they are connected with the community at large.

The other reason for the proliferation of polls, I think, is we've had an explosion of news media in the 1990s. Go back to just 1996. There was no MSNBC. There was no Fox News Channel. Only 4 percent of likely voters told us that they got any information whatsoever from the Internet. And yet 1996 was a major turning point in the development of new media in the United States. Come up to 2000. You now have a number of 24-hour news channels, each with their own polling outfit, each with their massive news holes that need to be filled, and one good way for news holes to be filled by news organizations, very simply, are by polls. Polls are good for generating news and good for reporting news. Add to that the fact that we have a proliferation, at least at the time, of dot-com news services, and so you had voter.com and a variety of other new media that were sponsoring their own polls.

And finally, a proliferation of polls because they are now easy and fast to do, and that's very important. Back when Gallup was in his heyday, in the '50s and '60s, the Gallup organization and Harris organization were doing polls face to face. It was a very cumbersome, unwieldy, almost, kind of process of sending and training people and sending them all over the United States to do face-to-face interviews, and then mailing packages over two or three days into Princeton, New Jersey, to tabulate results. Imagine how long that took. Things just moved so much faster. A poll that I took three days ago politically probably has no shelf life today. And so, especially in the closing days of the election, the faster you can do the polls, the more easily you can do them is probably one of the biggest reasons why you have so many of them.

We saw good polls and we saw some not-so-good polls. But I think that the thing that you need to understand about the pre-election polls is that by and large, we all did fairly well in suggesting that this was a very close election.

And so for the most part, with the exception of just two organizations -- the Rasmussen Portrait of America poll, and the Battleground voter.com poll, which had shown Bush leading by 7 to 9 points, and projected a large Bush victory -- the other polls were all well within the margin of error. I'm proud to say that ours was among the best. We saw a Gore -- you can't quite call it a "surge" when it was just so close. But clearly, there was just enough of a bump for Gore to put him slightly over the top in the popular vote. My colleagues who had Bush up by 1 or 2 percent certainly cannot be faulted. That was well within the margin of sampling error. That was good polling.

I think, just to close this book on the pre-election polls, that we need to have realistic expectations about polls. It used to be that if the poll that was published prior to the election, the last poll published prior to the election, if it was able to show who the winner was, or that the election was too close to call, within the margin of error, that was satisfying for the news media that sponsored the poll, and then also satisfying for the voters at large. We find that we have a lot of pressure on us these days to get it right and to get it right within the tenth of a percent. I have been fortunate over the years to get a number of polls close to within a tenth of a percent. But on the other hand, you're still talking about a margin of sampling error and you cannot expect perfection from pre-election polls.

I find that one of the reasons, anyway, for our company's accuracy is we leave the lights on longer than other polling agencies. We'll poll right up until 9:00 p.m. the night before the election, even midnight the night before the election to catch the West Coast, and then publish our results 7:00 a.m. Tuesday, Election Day morning, trying still to capture that last-minute break.

The other big story about polls during the election season were the exit polls, and a lot of debate and, in fact, congressional hearings that will be taking place. There's a congressional investigation of the exit polls and the networks and some of the awful projections that were made by the networks on election night. Here are some things I think that we need to remember about the exit polls. And I think I may very well generate some news here because I have some advice for the networks and for those at Voter News Service, those who do the exit polls.

First of all, no matter how good an exit poll is -- and they are very good -- there is a margin of error, and a margin of error could be 1 percent plus-or-minus, or in some states 2 percent plus-or-minus. When you have an election that is as close as this election is, that's the best that an exit poll can do, is to get it within the margin of error. There was absolutely, unequivocally no way that the state of Florida could have been projected as a victory one way or another. Period. Exclamation point. End of story.

It was just too close. And the networks really blew it in making that call.

Among the other things I think we need to know about the exit polls: not only is there a margin of sampling error in that they cannot be perfect, or perfect all the time. We need to understand network hubris; that sin of pride. I realize I may be biting at least one of the hands that feeds me because I polled for NBC News this year, but the fact of the matter is I have been asked about NBC: Did they call the election for Gore because there was an ideological bias within the newsroom? And I have to tell you, that is nowhere near the truth.

There is pressure because of network competition to make the call and make it before anybody else makes it. And so that kind of pressure can lead to a rush to judgment. Add to that some faulty exit poll data that came in from Northeastern Florida and from the Tampa area, and without even being there I know exactly what happened. NBC said, look, we've got -- it looks like we've got a buildup for Gore in these two areas. It was unexpected. We've got to call it -- we've got to make a call before the other networks -- they call it. And then they hold their breath.

The other networks, meanwhile, are yelling and screaming, why does NBC have it and we don't have it? Go find out what's going on and get back to us with an answer. And the other networks, within 10 minutes, call the election for Gore. Meanwhile at NBC -- (sighs) -- a sigh of relief; if they're calling it then we made the right call.

This is what we call -- I told this story in Canada a few weeks ago and I guess people didn't understand the metaphor -- the seven blind men and the elephant, you know, each feeling a piece of the elephant and describing it a completely different way than the reality of the elephant. These were the networks blindly leading each other blindly.

You need to also understand about the exit polls; that there are other, further limitations that I think are very troubling. There are what are known as three data dumps in the course of an election day. And so, sampling will take place about 6:00 a.m. to noon. And then the first dump of data will take place around 1:00 p.m. That's when the networks and those who purchase the exit polls start to get the early results that help them shape their election coverage for the late afternoon and the evening.

Meanwhile, while they're paying a fortune for this information, in inside circles it's one of the worst-kept secrets on election day because all of us who are in this business know whether we're working for clients that subscribe to the exit poll data or not. We know what the first results are anyway because everybody -- whoever gets it first, it's no good unless he can call 25 people and tell them, I got it first; give them the results and then the 25 -- before you know it it's worse than that sexy e-mail that that poor woman sent in England.

Before you know it, 10 million on Election Day know, you know, what the first results are. Then the second results come around 4:00, and then the last results around 7:00. But one of the problems with the exit poll relationship with networks is that that first dump of data that's received at 1:00, that almost becomes institutionalized for the rest of the day.

Let me give you some examples about this. I was polling in New Hampshire back in 1992, and one of the things that I learned in the race between Pat Buchanan and President Bush at the time was that Buchanan supporters came out to vote very, very early. They came out to vote before noon. Bush's supporters came out to vote after 5 p.m. Now, what would happen in the course of my polling is that I would call, in the pre-primary, and say, "How's it looking?" "Well, Buchanan is within 10 points of President Bush." My god! That was, like, at 1:00 in the afternoon. And then the results would come in -- 4:00, 5:00, 6:00 -- and Bush's lead would grow, and grow substantially.

Well, what happened on Election Night -- I may have been one of the few people who understood this -- what happened on Election Night, primary night in 1992, is, you may recall if you were covering this, that the network position, all of the networks, were, "Pat Buchanan did terrible damage to President Bush." The first exit poll results had Bush leading 54 to 46. Now, that's tremendous damage for somebody like Pat Buchanan against a sitting president of the United States. And that became the coverage -- 6:00, 7:00, 8:00. "Looks to us" -- you know, Bill Snyder (sp) and those folks are saying -- "that Pat Buchanan has really given this president" -- well, when all was said and done, the final count was about 62 to 38, even 63 to 37, Bush over Buchanan; not enough to say that Buchanan did damage. But the networks could not wait for the final results to come in, even the final exit poll tally to come in. They were reporting on the basis of that early dump of information. That was misleading. And I think it still continues to be a problem within the networks.

So what are the lessons to be learned about the exit polls? They can make mistakes because it's sampling, and sampling has a margin of sampling error. And when you get an election this close, that's well within the margin of sampling error, my god, if you can't even count the votes correctly, then obviously, there's got to be room for the polls that are using samples to make mistakes. Exit polls can tell us whether an election is close or not close. That's about as far as they can go.

I think that the exit polls and the networks need to go back to a different kind of system. And here are my recommendations.

Number one, I don't believe that the networks should use exit polls to call the elections. Now, that's a pollster saying that. I think what the networks should do is use the exit polls internally to drive coverage for the evening, but then, because every county in the United States is computerized, wait for the results, the actual voting results to come in. And if we've got to all wait until 11:00 at night or 10:30 at night to find out who won, so be it. Better that than making the wrong call. Use the actual results. Make projections on the basis of actual results coming in, but don't use the exit polls.

Why not, then, just abolish the exit polls? No. The exit polls need to be there to do what they do best and what they were always designed to do in the first place, and that is to, very simply, tell us who voted and why they voted the way they did. That is the real use of exit poll data. And that's precisely and, I believe, only what they should be used for. And that, then, is valuable, tremendously valuable information. Period.

So, what happened this election? You know, it's funny. During the course of polling in this election, I would talk to a lot of people. And there was a group out there who would say, here and there, "God, I wish both of these guys would lose." Well, for a while, both of those guys lost. America did not elect a winner on Election Day. And in fact, we can debate this for years and years to come. For those of you who may understand my metaphor, I think the Florida election results will become the second gunman on the grassy knoll for reporters and writers over the next 10 years, and all sorts of conspiracy theories.

If I can quote our president-elect, in my heart it seems to me that the evidence is going to show that Al Gore won in Florida. It seems to -- it looked that way. We're going to get a number of counts, as you know, by the New York Times and other news agencies. And then some of the folks that have been holed up in Dallas, Texas, for the last 38 years studying the second gunman on the grassy knoll, they may move to Palm Beach County, you know, and look at this one. (Laughter.) You need a new story every 40 years or so, I guess.

But the fact of the matter is, neither gentleman really won this election. This was a tie, and this is what a tie looks like. And when you add up all the elements of the tie, it is so compelling. Razor-thin popular vote. A razor-thin electoral vote, 271 to 267. A tie in the United States Senate. A virtual tie in the House of Representatives. A 4-to-3 decision by the Florida Supreme Court, a 5- to-4 decision by the United States. It does not get any closer than this.

What that means translated is that there really is no mandate except, I believe, a mandate to govern in the center. And that is the only way to interpret this election. I think that Bush may well be starting out on the wrong foot by appointing such a partisan Cabinet. I think he has some built-in problems, and among those problems are that, unlike any other president in recent history -- with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, but to a much lesser degree --

George W. Bush enters the presidency with substantial percentages of key constituencies -- African Americans, Hispanics and Democrats -- who deny his very legitimacy as president of the United States. That's the problem that he faces.

And he needs to build a governing majority. And the only place to win that governing majority is in the center. And so that means not that he appoints a Colin Powell and a Condoleezza Rice, or a Mel Martinez, and says, "Ah, I'm diverse, just like America." It means he's got to look at their issues and build a bridge to some of their issues in order to, number one, at least get some of those groups off of his back. They can make it very difficult for him. And number two, so that he can attract enough voters in the center so that he can build a governing majority.

What about Al Gore? We did a 2004 -- oh, don't fault me. I have to make a living, just like you do.

(Chuckles.) And we asked right after his concession speech -- which 95 percent of the American people approved of -- we asked Democrats who they would choose as their standard-bearer, and Gore had 36 percent, Hillary had 18 percent, and then you had Gephardt and Jackson and Bob Kerrey and the like at 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and so on. The good news is, of course, is that Al Gore is at the top of list. The bad news is that he was only polling 36 percent of his own Democrats, which is not very strong, especially when you have the brand-new senator from New York biting at his heels.

Which leads now to that new senator from New York. I, for one, did not believe she was going to win. However, in my lifetime, political lifetime -- and that's well over 30 years now -- I have never seen a more terrible campaign run than the campaign that was run by the Republicans and Rick Lazio. The best that could be said about the campaign was that it was boneheaded, and the worst that can be said about it was that it was reprehensible.

He ran, for a Republican, a Democratic campaign. He focused most of his attention in New York City, where he was not going to do well, and less of his attention in upstate New York, where he needed to do well.

She, on the other hand, worked very, very hard, 10 times harder, than he did, and she ran a successful Republican campaign. She finessed her support in the city, which was always going to be strong, and she spent most of her time -- in some cases, almost all of her time -- bouncing around upstate New York, to the point where, in the final analysis, he became the carpetbagging candidate and she became the local kid who was running in upstate New York. She became very familiar in Elmira and in Watertown and in Rochester. She just covered all of that area, which he didn't do. That was the stupid part on his part.

The reprehensible part is -- was that 10 days before the election, 500,000 phone calls were made to voters linking Hillary with the terrorists who attacked the U.S.S. Cole. That was disgusting.

And just to clear something up, as a very proud Arab American, one of my own clients, Fox 5 in New York, who I was polling for -- I was on a show three days before the election, and they said, "You know, you're an Arab American, and couldn't you possibly be biased in this election?" And I said, "On the contrary, both of these candidates are equally disgusting to me. I can be totally objective in this race." (Laughter.)

He went after where she got her money. She, in the -- with -- the 14th chapter of "Profiles in Courage" will not be written about her -- gave the money back. And in the process, he still turned around and charged her with being linked to terrorists. It was disgusting, and it backfired on the Republicans, and backfired on them horribly. I can't say enough about how awful that campaign was.

But she did become the local girl, and he became the carpetbagger.

Oh, there's so much that we could -- that I could talk about, but why don't I answer some questions?

Yes? Oh, you want to do --

MODERATOR: (Off mike.)

MR. ZOGBY: Okay. Sure.

Q Peter -- (off mike) -- TV. I'm wondering if you think that the proliferation of polls is the wave of the future, we're going to see more of it, or, on the contrary, in 2004 we're going to see consolidation and maybe a little bit less of it.

MR. ZOGBY: I don't think you're going to see any consolidation. I think if the numbers of news media grow -- that is, if the dot-coms get back on their feet in time -- you'll probably see some more polls. But I think that eventually there will be a consolidation into the major polls, the ones that you need to look at and the ones that may just have small, little constituencies.

But yeah, the wave of the future is, you know, the more and more we are modernized, the more and more we become Internet-driven, the more and more atomized we become as individuals, all the more reason why people are going to want to feel more and more connected.

And so even those who complain the loudest about the polls I find are the ones that can cite every number as they come out.

Q Is the proliferation a good thing?

MR. ZOGBY: Well, I think like everything else, there's a proliferation of new media, and then eventually the dust will settle. It's certainly not a bad thing. It's a thing.

Q Parasuram, Press Trust of India. I was wondering whether you could describe the methodology you employ because most of the polls, I believe, poll about a thousand people or a smaller number. And what kind of staff do you have to be able to project all that; I mean a typical polling organization, how many people do they employ, and do they employ all over the country?

And secondly, what kind of influence do they have on the issues which the candidates debate? Do the candidates look at the polls to see what the people are interested in and tailor their speeches and statements to that? In other words, they have absolutely no opinions whatsoever, and they really are just -- I mean they're all insincere trying to adjust their speeches, statements, to what the people will vote for and not what they believe in?

MR. ZOGBY: Two very good questions. The second one maybe a bit more time than the first one.

In terms of polling organizations, you can have them so small that it's only two or three people -- an analyst, a computer expert. Then what they do is they farm-out the telephone calls to any number of what we call WATS houses -- telephone houses in Nebraska or Provo, Utah, or whatever. On the other hand, you have a Gallup organization or a Roper organization that employs thousands. We're somewhere in the middle. Our payroll is a little over 400, and we have 40 full- time staff and are growing.

But to put a cap on that portion of your question, a sample of a thousand is sufficient to represent the diversity and to get a meaningful result within a margin of sampling error -- plus-or-minus three margin of error. That gives us an opportunity to make sure that the key regions of the United States, the key demographic groups, like racial groups and age groups and religious groups, are adequately represented.

Now, the second part of your question gets deep. I, for one, don't think that our politicians are poll-driven, and I don't believe that our president was poll-driven any more than his predecessor was, who used to go into the Oval Office -- President Bush -- every morning at 7:00 a.m. and receive fresh polling data.

Basically, using these two men as prime examples, these two men had core principles that they identified with, core positions. You know, Clinton certainly to the left of center, but centrist; President Bush to the right of center, but certainly centrist as well.

And the polling data was used to do two things -- number one to refine the message; to make sure that the communication was proper and adequate, and then number two, to determine that -- what issues needed to be emphasized and which needed to be dropped.

No matter how despotic a ruler can be, no ruler can survive by being 100 percent, totally contemptuous of the public. And so, in an instance like this in our representative form of government, we elect a president, or elect legislators, and one of the elements in the policy debate has got to be public opinion. But it can't be the only element and I don't think it is the only element.

Q Jose Carreno with El Universal of Mexico. What are the chances -- realistic chances, I mean, of a reform in the polling -- in the divulgation of poll results and -- this is even harder -- of a reform in the voting system of the U.S.? Is there a majority for a change of the electoral college?

MR. ZOGBY: Two good questions; the second one first. You will not see a change in the electoral college, for a variety of reasons. It is possible to win 11 states, lose 39, and win the popular vote. That means that Nebraska, Arkansas, Rhode Island become completely disfranchised. They'll never see a presidential candidate. That's one reason.

The other reason is the founding fathers were elitists and they believed, from their point of view, that those who own the government should rule the government. Those are the words of John Jay, (sp) our first attorney general. But you bring it up in the 20th Century, and suppose you have a demagogue who is able to raise money via the Internet and send a message via the Internet and television and win the popular vote. The electoral college was supposed to be that last institutionalized check against, perhaps the dangerous will of the people.

That second reason, you know, it comes under the category "it can't happen here" I suppose. But, you know, Germany did elect Hitler and his party before he became the Fuhrer. And so it's that final check against demagoguery. But in terms of the real reason, the smaller states just -- who of course have two United States senators -- it would require a constitutional amendment and they would just never go for it.

Now, the first part -- you will not see legislation in any way limiting the Voter News Service and the exit polls. What you might find is -- going back to an older system you may find two things. One is that instead of the one exit poll, now each of the networks goes back and has its own exit poll. It's a costly endeavor, and the thought that the pool idea, where they will all pool together and hire one service made a lot of sense; I think that the competition may prove itself to be healthier.

Secondly, they're going to have to police themselves. And that discussion is going on internally. And among the policing that has to take place -- it has to be both the Voter News Service itself, or the exit polls themselves, but I think even more importantly the networks have got to get together just as they did back in 1980 and said, look, these are just some things we can't do anymore.

Q If I may follow up; what was the real impact, if any, of that famous Bush cousin in Fox News or Voter News that early in the season was credited with some misdeeds in there?

MR. ZOGBY: Yeah, I understand that. Of course Fox, though, did not have the viewing audiences that NBC, CBS, ABC, and all those organizations have.

I mean, so that call by Fox could have fell on -- fallen on deaf ears.

The same mistakes were made at 2:30 in the morning by CBS, ABC, and CNN, all of them.

So I don't know. I mean, I think that it will -- it is something that needs to be studied a whole lot more, and will be. But -- and I think that it will also be taken up by conspiracy theorists. But I don't think that that was the source of the major problem. It was within Fox, but not the others.

MODERATOR: I think she has a question over here --

Q I am Noriko Hiobashi (sp) from Japan. And I'm an independent contributor to the Japanese press, and I'm also from G.W.

My question is about campaign polling, which is relevant to the second question that the gentleman from India had asked you. And did you find any crucial moments in terms of strategic decisions with opinion polling? For example, that George W. Bush -- was it skillful, in reading polls, to take an ambiguous position, for example, over some crucial issues of abortion, in which the people might -- (inaudible)? And for example, Albert Gore and was he right in making the decision to keep himself from President Clinton, in terms of personal view?

MR. ZOGBY: Yeah, I think that there were a number of decisions that were made based on some kind of polling that I think were very faulty.

On Gore's end, there were two things. One was that he did not include President Clinton. I said this before the election: That was an ace in the hole for him, and he should have utilized President Clinton, especially among African Americans and the Latino voters. This was so close. Anything could have put Gore over the top, even in states like Wisconsin, you know.

The other mistake that Gore made was that he wasted an awful lot of time with a silly populist campaign. That was supposed to be an effort on his part to drive voters away from Ralph Nader. It didn't work. In fact, if anything, Nader support held steady and went up until the waning hours of the campaign. But it was also ungainly, because Al Gore just doesn't look like a populist fighting the prescription drug -- the pharmaceutical companies, nor was the atmosphere right. In order for populism to work, there has to be some anger and demand for reform. And you were out there covering; there was no anger. Anger was on sabbatical this year.

I think Bush made some mistakes as well. And the two words that work for Bush very well were "compassionate conservative." We saw his numbers drive up. And then after the Democratic convention, you never heard George W. Bush utter those two words, "compassionate" and "conservative," until the third debate. And that helped push him up a little bit. Where was that all that time that he could have used it?

The other mistake that his folks made -- and this was a sin of hubris on -- I hope I'm being insulting to both candidates; I don't want you to think that I'm partisan here in any way.

Q We don't think that.

MR. ZOGBY: They stopped polling on Thursday night before the election.

I just found that astounding. And I know that they -- for a fact that they stopped polling because they were bugging us every couple of hours. You know, "What have you got now, what have you got now, what have you got now, what have you got now?" And so that told me they really did stop polling. But they, as late as the day before the election, they told Governor Bush, "You've got 322 electoral votes locked up, and you're going to win by seven to nine points, it's a landslide." Wow, were they wrong. I mean, one could make an argument that Bush ought to consider the death penalty right there, for people who carried that message. That -- no, don't include that in that transcript here, okay? (Laughter.) And if you do, then put -- I've seen the transcripts of these -- put "Raucous laughter followed." Okay. (Laughter.)

Q Andrei Sitov from TASS, from Russia. In retrospect, what were the biggest issues? Do you study these things?

MR. ZOGBY: Yeah.

Q Was the choice made basically on personalities or the issues? And in looking at the issues, what were the most important? And obviously for this audience, was the foreign policy so negligible -- (laughs) -- as to being almost insignificant? And can you differentiate within the realm of foreign policy whether there were any relatively more important issues, relatively less important issues?

MR. ZOGBY: Okay. We asked voters right on up to the end what the important issues were, and they were always consistent that it was education and health care, Social Security and morality. And sometimes the order would change, but education generally was up there number one. But I think in terms of what ultimately drove this election, it was morality. And I'll tell you why.

When we looked at voters who said that education or health care was the number-one issue, then Gore had the advantage. When we looked at Social Security, Gore had a bigger advantage, although the two had been tied, but Gore was able to scare some voters on Bush's privatization plan. But when it came to morality and character, Bush beat Gore by 50 points. And that was where the real difference was in the election. And that was, frankly, the only reason why this election was even close. Otherwise, Gore would have just run away with it.

I wrote a piece for Newsday a few weeks ago when the election was finally over, and the editors wanted to know why couldn't Gore catch a break. You know, he never was able to sell himself during the election, during the campaign. And after the election, he really had the moral imperative. There were serious voting issues. And yet he never conveyed it. It always became an air of inevitability that Bush would win; when is Gore going to concede? And it just reminded me of the old story, and I used this in the Newsday column that I wrote, about the company that wanted to create the perfect dog food. So they brought in all the Nobel science prize winners, gathered them together, and they put together all of the perfect ingredients for the perfect dog food. But there was only one problem; the dogs hated it. They wouldn't eat it. And that was Gore's problem. He had all the right stuff, but the dogs just didn't like the dog food. (Laughter.)

You had another question. Oh, foreign policy. It was negligible. Foreign policy becomes an issue when there is a foreign policy issue. You know, when there is something on the agenda. You know, American troops somewhere, an engagement somewhere, a potential crisis somewhere. And there was always the possibility, as there has been in the past, for one of those to be manufactured. As it turns out, even the Middle East crisis proved to not be much of an issue because neither side came in with any advantage or disadvantage on that, and so it just neutralized.

Q My name is Ben Bangora (sp), Guinea News, Washington correspondent. I don't know if you have been doing some polling since Bush began shaping his government. But I was wondering if the appointment of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to head the foreign policy department has a little bit shaped the mood in favor of Bush among the African American community, or what he should be doing.

MR. ZOGBY: Okay. The last time I polled on that kind of an issue was the night of Gore's concession speech. Now, I have been in the field since. We haven't tested it. But I can tell you that at least as of that point, African Americans and Hispanics still had a problem with the legitimacy of Bush. That the Colin Powell appointment, while it is a source of pride, it is not a constituency- based decision. So African American leaders as well as rank and file say, "Yeah, but what about hate crimes legislation," you know, "what about the economy, what about schools in our neighborhoods?" and so on. And so it's not anything that is -- I don't believe it's going to change their attitude. They tell us that they are disfranchised.

Q If I could follow up on that, is there anything he should do to get them on board?

MR. ZOGBY: I think so. I think what President Bush should do is the following. Number one, I think he needs to form a national panel to study voting rights and restudy voting rights, and to ensure that this panel will do an objective study of this past election and voting procedures and come back with recommendations for how everyone's vote is assured that it's counted fairly. That's number one.

Number two -- and I don't understand this for the life of me -- I'm going to speak to the National Republican Conference right after this. It's 50 Republican senators. And what I'm going to tell them is, it's one thing to appoint a Colin Powell or a Condoleezza Rice and say to the African American community, "There, we did it, but these are Republicans." It's a whole other thing to say, "I'm listening to what your issues are and I'm willing to come halfway."

And so what I would do is among his first pieces of legislation is to pass a hate crimes bill. Frankly, I don't understand why he wouldn't do it. I don't understand even what the risk is of a hate crimes bill, and I think that that would be a significant overture -- both of those, the panel, the blue ribbon panel and the hate crimes legislation.

Q Hitoshi Omae with Nikkei Newspaper, Japanese daily newspaper. The point Gore lost West Virginia and his hometown Tennessee. That means the country is also polarized; you mentioned there is no mandate; only mandate is (centralized ?). So it means it's too polarized constituents in this country, also there's a large number of centrists.

MR. ZOGBY: Yeah. You know, I've looked at that famous map, you know, the blue and the red map; and blue down the coasts and red in the middle. But two things jumped out at me -- and I'm an American historian by training -- one is that there's always been this great divide in the United States. If you go back to the 1780s, when we had the Federalists versus the anti-Federalists, in terms of whether they supported our Constitution or not, what you found back that then is that in the original 13 states, the cosmopolitan areas along the coast were Federalist, and as soon as you got off into the frontier and in the agrarian or agricultural counties, those were militantly against the Constitution. That is the story of much of our history.

Secondly, if you look at that map, the blue and the red map, and look at it in great detail, you see little blue counties in Nebraska and little blue counties in South Dakota. I mean, so basically, there is an urban-rural split, not just a coastal-center split. And you also have -- I mean, Alabama is red, but it elected a Jewish, liberal, Democratic governor two years ago. Georgia has been voting Democrat. North Carolina has been voting Democrat.

So I don't see that map as a monolith, as some of my colleagues do.

Q Thomas Gorguissian, Al Wafd, Egypt. Mr. Zogby, the first, what is the cost -- or let's say the price tag of this polling process? Usually we hear that -- we know that the advertisement, political advertisement is between 25 percent and one-third of the campaigning.

MR. ZOGBY: I'm reaching in my wallet to get you pictures of my kids -- (laughter) -- so that when I answer your question, you'll just have a context for it.

Q And how do you describe -- related to this, how do you describe in general with pollings the mood of the Americans now? Are they hating politics, politicians? What? They trust the political system, the Supreme Court, and all these things?

My second question is related to the -- who is financing polls? I mean, I got the impression from your -- related to George Bush campaign that always everything is fine, rosy. And in the last few days, there was some criticism of your poll regarding the Palestinian state and moving of the embassy. Are these polls tailored, or let's say oriented according to the person who paid for it?

MR. ZOGBY: Good question. Very good question, so let me start. First of all, costwise, in a campaign, you're looking at anywhere from 5 percent to 10 percent of a campaign budget spent on polling and research, meaning focus groups and advertising research and so on. And so you can be looking at a substantial amount of money when you're talking about polling, tracking polls daily, tracking polls daily in key states, and so on. It can be a very lucrative business. In a number of campaigns -- at the presidential level, there is more than one pollster. One pollster normally can't handle that amount of traffic. Besides that, they want a check and a balance and different thoughts.

The second question is a very important one. Who pays for polls? A wide variety of organizations are utilizing polling. That could be anywhere from trade associations to lobbying organizations to corporations to political action committees and so on. Many of those organizations utilize what are known as omnibus surveys. So in other words, we run a weekly poll. We'll poll a thousand likely voters nationwide every week, and organizations are invited to buy questions. Some may only want to buy one, two, three or five questions, put them in the poll and they're included in an omnibus. One organization calls it a "caravan" poll, you know? So we're done with abortion, let's move on to vouchers. Now, what kind of bug spray do you use? You know, that sort of thing.

But other organizations, the bigger and the more sophisticated, want to do polls about their image and how the American people feel about their policies and how they should tweak their message, and here is where some of the misunderstanding takes place. Thomas, it is perfectly legitimate for an organization to come to me and say privately, We want to know, should we use this message or should we use this message? Which one is more effective? And so that question then we'll work out together with the organization and ask what could be a biased question, but it turns out that it's being used privately to determine an advertising campaign; the proper language to use.

On the other hand, if an organization tells us -- and this is how it is with our colleagues, as well, because I'm an independent pollster -- if the organization tells us, We want to release the results of the poll, then I absolutely, unequivocally, get the final edit on the wording of the question and will not allow a question to be asked for public release that is not an objectively worded question.

But will I do polls that are what we call in the business "push" polls? And I don't mean those horrible things that you hear about. I mean push polls that try to determine what will move people. Sure I'll do those, but those are for private planning purposes.

MODERATOR: We thank you very much.

MR. ZOGBY: Thank you.

MODERATOR: Fantastic briefing.

MR. ZOGBY: Thank you.

(Applause.)

END.

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