Survey Says . . .

With election day approaching, polls continue to pique public interest. Journalists ply their articles and television reports with numbers from Gallup and CNN. And with the Internet, nearly any type of poll result is little more than a click away.

But many Americans are becoming increasingly dependent on polls for their understanding of developing political races. And amid the sea of approval indexes and rankings, polls meant to serve as election barometers are having some unexpected effects.

Americans like polls, and the nature of their appeal is obvious. Poll results provide a glimpse into the future — a means for seeing the likely outcome of an election weeks, even months, before it actually occurs.

Political experts call this preoccupation with knowing who leads a race a "horse-race mentality." And they say such a mindset can be problematic.

Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup Poll and vice president of the Gallup Organization, said focusing too much on poll results can distract voters from learning candidates' qualifications and their positions on key issues.

"The horse-race mentality distorts the process and sometimes influences votes," Newport said. "If voters want to use polls to choose their candidate then they will, but they can make up their own minds."

Even early in a political race, poll results can influence voters in ways that can affect campaign strategies and even impact the outcome of an election.

For example, people who might otherwise have cast their votes for a non-majority candidate are often discouraged by poll results showing that candidate lagging behind, explained University politics professor Larry Bartels. As a result, they choose to shift their support to a candidate from one of major parties.

"Third-party candidates like Nader often look fairly strong but then fade as people begin to focus on the practical consequences of their choice and on which candidates are viable to them," Bartels said.

And on election day, poll results may even discourage people from casting their vote. Based on polls that indicate their candidate is winning or losing by a margin too large to influence, people may decide not to vote.

"This was a big deal in the 1996 Clinton-Dole election," University politics professor Adam Berinsky noted. "The polls predicted that Clinton would win by a large margin, so Clinton supporters did not bother going to the polls. Dole lost by much less than expected."

Because plummeting poll numbers can substantially accelerate a less popular candidate's political demise, that process of natural selection serves to reinforce America's two-party system.

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"One effect of the electoral process is helping to maintain the system of two serious candidates for the two parties," Bartels said. "The alternative is to scatter votes between several candidates, which makes it much harder to figure out what the outcome would be."

Information access

Because of the news media's apparent fascination with covering political events, polls are vital to reporters because they provide quick access to election data.

"Polls make an easy story for journalists who have to write something about elections each day," Berinsky said. "Debates don't happen every day, but there are always poll results."

Polls are also popular with the average American voter. "People are inherently curious. That is a social instinct," Newport said. "In the same way people want to know about anything, people wonder how candidates are doing in elections."

Though both voters and politicians weigh poll results heavily when making their respective political decisions, poll results are rarely 100-percent reliable, according to Berinsky. "It's easy to conduct polls," he said, "but you need to look at the methods used to determine their reliability."

For example, Internet polls, though easily administered, are often very inaccurate because respondents do not make up a random sample. "Internet samples can't be used to generalize for the American public because one-half of Americans don't have Internet access," Newport said.

Berinsky agreed that Internet poll results are not equally representative of both major political parties. "Internet polls are non-representative because certain Websites attract more conservatives, like FOX, and other sites attract more liberals," he said.

Both Berinsky and Newport agreed, however, that many newspapers and polling organizations produce accurate and representative poll results. "Major newspapers and media organizations like CNN, NBC and The Washington Post conduct polls that are generally very reliable," Newport said.

The tracking poll — in which pollsters average results gathered during a period of several days — yields the most accurate results, Newport said.

Recent poll percentages for Bush and Gore have been volatile — an uncommon occurrence this close to election day, Newport said.

"There's always a group of hard-core Democrats and Republicans," Newport said, "but there are enough straddling the fence that the whole barrage of information from radio commercials, TV information and the debates during the fall of election year may change their minds."