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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Department: April 2006
Survey Says...
Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo on integrity, gay marriage and cold calls
Story by Rich Ehisen
Since 1947, the Field Poll has let California political leaders in on what voters are thinking. Appearing regularly in newspapers across the state, the Field Poll has at one time or another tallied what we think and feel about everything from taxes to the death penalty. The San Francisco-based Field Research Corp. is also one of the leading private sector research firms in the nation, providing numerous industries with critical customer and business-to-business feedback. We sat down recently with Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo, who has been with Field since 1978, to discuss the art of public polling and where California might be leaning in the near future.
Comstock’s: There are lots of pollsters out there, but they are not all created equal. What makes a poll something consumers should take seriously?
DiCamillo: The first distinction should be who is sponsoring the poll. Most legitimate polls are what I call “public-benefit polls,” those that are sponsored by the news media, a foundation or some other nonpartisan entity that is just trying to expand knowledge. You really need to separate public polls from those done by a private interest group, campaign or a candidate. Those groups only release polls that support their point of view, or they ask questions designed to elicit a response that puts their candidate or cause in a positive light.
The second distinction is in survey methods. Most legitimate polls will use the traditional random-digit-dial method, which gives everybody with a phone an equal chance to be surveyed. We are also seeing Internet polls these days, which don’t get a random sample of the public, but rather a convenient sample of people that are willing to be polled. Those people are often also paid for their participation, which really raises questions about the integrity of the survey.
Comstock’s: There were some vastly different results coming from various polls during last fall’s special election, particularly with the ballot measures. What happened there?
DiCamillo: Proposition elections are a lot trickier and open to contentiousness than a simple candidate race, where you are simply reading someone a Democrat candidate’s name against a Republican candidate’s name.
I think what we saw in the last election cycle was some pollsters not being familiar with how to go about asking the right questions for a proposition election. You can’t just make up your own ballot questions. You really need to keep your questions in line with what voters are actually going to see on their voting pamphlet. I think some of those polls showed a real lack of experience in that area.
Comstock’s: Most polls, including Field, predicted well beforehand that Gov. Schwarzenegger’s “Year of Reform” agenda was going to get killed at the ballot box. While some politicians are notorious for being poll driven, Schwarzenegger instead publicly dismissed those results in favor of his own internal polls. What happened, and do you think this year he will be inclined to take outside polling more seriously?
DiCamillo: First and foremost, I think that they were operating in a very highly charged partisan environment, much of which came from Washington D.C.-based consultants that transferred the D.C. way of doing things to California. In that world, anyone who isn’t “with us” is “against us,” so they lashed out at any polls that didn’t conform to their own views. But they were engaging in a lot of wishful thinking because they were framing their polling questions in a way that presumed how voters might react after they had been exposed to the campaign messages in all of the TV ads.
I don’t think anyone — us included — can accurately presume how voters will actually frame an issue in their own minds two or three months down the road. The safest course is always to give voters the same stimulus they will see when they go to vote, which is the actual ballot description.
As far as this year is concerned, I’ll just say that we’ve been doing proposition polling for 50 years, the last 10 of which are posted on our Web site [field.com]. Of the 62 ballot measures we have measured in that time, we called the final result correctly in 58 of them. That’s a pretty good record, so I’ll put our way up against anyone.
Comstock’s: You mentioned Internet polling. Some observers contend online polling is the wave of the future because it can reach such a large sampling size. Do you agree?
DiCamillo: Sample size is really overblown. Once you have surveyed 1,000 people, you are already at a plus or minus 3 percent margin of sampling error, which is a pretty precise measure. Another thousand interviews will only decrease that to about 2, so trying to get that precision really has a point of diminishing returns.
That said, the Internet has advantages for private industry polling that is going after particular niche markets in the consumer marketplace because you can target specific characteristics. In the health field, for example, if you wanted to do a random sampling of people that have asthma, you can zero in on only those people who fit the criteria. Finding them via a telephone search, however, could be really time-consuming and expensive because you would have to keep calling and calling until you randomly found an adult that had asthma and could answer your questions.
Comstock’s: You have a large number of private sector clients. Do you approach those surveys differently than you do public policy surveys for your media clients?
DiCamillo: Generally speaking, we use the same methodology. The real difference is in the sampling populations. Industry is usually not interested in a sampling of the entire population, but rather in opinions from people in their own particular market where they are trying to sell their products. In that regard, we never sugarcoat results, because our clients need this information to accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of their own businesses so they can act on them.
Comstock’s: What has been the most consistent thing you have observed in all of these years of polling California voters? What trends do you see?
DiCamillo: People try to encapsulate California as if it is one big entity, when in reality it is composed of many interesting and different parts. Inland voters, for instance, are much more red state on political issues, whereas coastal voters are much more likely to vote like a blue state. That said, I think there is a real difference between California and the rest of the nation in terms of being more tolerant of differences in people and lifestyle.
We’ve always been supportive of abortion rights and issues of environmental protection, and California has certainly been the leader in citizen tax revolt and the rise of personality driven politics. Gay marriage is probably the biggest new emerging issue. There isn’t majority support for that yet, but there is a huge generational component to this, with a majority of younger Californians supporting it. As I read the data, it is only a matter of time before the younger generation outnumbers the older generation and gay marriage is legalized.
