What the American People Want - 4 October 2002

We were just settled in to our 6pm "medication" when I switched on the so-called world news and it showed a close-up of a handsome, middle-aged senator bawling out "The American people demand ...".

"Enough, enough," cried my life partner, which does seem a little unfair to a man making his case for re-election to the Senate next month.

Unfortunately we've been hearing that phrase and variations of it every night, so that "the American people want ...", "the American people are determined ...", "the American people demand ...", has become an incantation - a mantra, as the current phrase has it.

I think it's the most unfortunate thing that the president's urgent campaign to have Iraq inspected and disarmed should come one month before the congressional election.

It doesn't help the popular belief in the president's crusade that every place he's travelled to in the past week or two has been a party dinner raising millions of dollars for next month's Republican candidates.

I suppose politicians and newspaper editors for two centuries at least have been telling the people of every civilised country what their country wants. In other words they claim a private line to public opinion.

And during all that time only a few historians, essayists, have asked the essential question: Yes, but how do they know what America wants?

The great French historian of the early days of this republic, Tocqueville, called public opinion "dominant" without defining it.

Another Frenchman, Montaigne, regretted that it is not measurable.

It's a very simple question, as all reporters' questions that go to the heart are simple. It is childlike.

Children don't ask, What is the principle of photosynthesis? - they ask, Why does the sun shine? - and thus stump more parents than would care to be identified.

So when did a child first feel so irritated by the universally-accepted conclusion that public opinion is unmeasurable, that he decided to do something about it?

Well out in the middle western farming state of Iowa a child, comparative child of 21 years, started an experiment, wrote a PhD thesis that would come to have the profoundest effect on politics and politicians and the practice of democracy everywhere in the world.

This young man's thesis bore the rather clumsy title of A New Technique for Objective Methods for Measuring Reader Interest in Newspapers.

In the summer of 1922 this young, burly man was a type we called in those days a go-getter. His name was George H Gallup.

In his first summer break from college he joined 49 other students hired by the leading paper of St Louis, Missouri, to go knocking door to door in the city and simply ask people what they did and didn't like about the paper.

Fifty-five thousand doors were knocked on.

Young Gallup did his part but towards the end he grew bored with the same mechanical answers and he thought this was a poor method.

And then he conceived his thesis, having discovered an 18th Century Swiss mathematician and his statistical theory of probabilities.

From him and experiments with the readership of other papers he discovered a way of selecting a few people who would accurately represent a lot.

It was called a statistical sample, whereby you matched your respondents as to race, geography, physical type, taste, married, single, political prejudices and so on.

It took Gallup eight years before he was satisfied that he'd found an objective method of sampling a huge population with the probability of only two or three per cent error.

He tried it out with several newspapers that were astonished to discover when they acted on his survey how accurately he'd gauged the taste, the preferences of his readers.

In no time more offers came in to the 29 year old and soon the eager embrace of a New York advertising firm that became a true believer.

It was however his mother-in-law who put it to him that this sampling method should not be restricted to newspaper owners or advertising agencies: how about voters - elections?

George Gallup tried it out on voters in local elections and one day he set up his own private, majestic company called The American Institute of Public Opinion.

He was a still non-entity to the public at large and certainly no threat to the Literary Digest, the most famous, prestigious American literary magazine which had been doing and publishing the results of its national surveys even at presidential elections for 20 years.

It had correctly predicted the election of Franklin Roosevelt to the White House in 1932 in the pit of the Depression.

Gallup's big day came in the next presidential year of 1936.

The Literary Digest had previously sent out millions of postcards and from the returned ones predicted the results.

In 1936 the Digest put in thousands of telephone calls and followed up the registration lists of automobile owners and sent out a million postcards.

This technique did not alarm Gallup, it made him say to an intimate friend that the Republican candidate would do very well among people who owned telephones and cars but that figure left out an awful lot of Americans.

Gallup used his own method - on, of course, a small sample - an object of derision to the giants of the Literary Digest.

Roosevelt defeated the governor by 46 states to two.

There was an old political maxim that because the state of Maine which voted early had usually set a trend, "as Maine goes so goes the nation".

After Roosevelt won every state but Maine and Vermont his campaign manager amended the maxim - as Maine goes, so goes Vermont.

Anyway the Digest had predicted the Republican would win a walloping victory with 57% of the vote. He got 37%.

Gallup predicted the Roosevelt landslide almost exactly.

A biographer wrote: "He had killed forever the politician's hunch."

He also killed the Literary Digest, which very soon went out of business.

The Gallup poll was subscribed to all across the country and as the Second War loomed up it was taken up in Britain and eventually by most democratic countries.

Of course the people who actually came to hate Gallup's method were the politicians.

This man with his scientific statistical sample had pre-empted the politicians' privilege - which they'd long come to look on as a right - the privilege of telling the population what most of it felt and thought.

One of the first to feel and protest that his secret gift of having his finger on the public pulse was being stolen from him was Winston Churchill.

He alone had achieved the immense feat of character of rousing a listless people and by telling them they were heroic had made them act so.

In 1941 when the Battle of Britain had been won but a perilous year lay ahead he warned the House of Commons that reading the Gallup poll and acting on it was a form of hypochondria.

"Nothing," he said, "is more dangerous in war time than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup poll - always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature."

And ever since, throughout the last 60 years, politicians of all stripes in most democratic countries have alternately read the polls and modified their policy accordingly or kept on reminding people that polls can sometimes be disastrously wrong - or more prudently have hired pollsters of their own to try and bend the uncomfortable public verdict a little more their way.

I bring all this up because our most conservative paper, which sometimes has to be held up with braces to maintain its support for President Bush, continually reports a Gallup poll which shows that 67% of the people will back the president in an attack on Iraq.

Yesterday it went down to 61%.

What the paper does not report is that only 43% will go along if Britain is the one ally - and only 39% if there are no allies at all.

President Bush keeps on in his resounding baritone, assuring the people that they're with him and must be all the way.

But in matters of great gravity and peril no prime minister, no president any longer governs.

A hundred and eight years ago Lord Bryce - the best British ambassador to Washington there's ever been and the author of the classic work on the American constitution - wrote: if the will of the majority of the citizens were ever to become ascertainable, no body of representatives but public opinion would not only reign but govern.

Well, the will of the majority did become ascertainable, thanks to an Iowa farm boy born 100 years ago.

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