When my late friend Dick Doran (1935-2007) died earlier this year, I learned for the first time that my former supervisor when I was a Congressional intern in 1967 had published a novel entitled It Takes A Villain in 2003. Reading it, I became fascinated with its theme: political polling leads to the manipulation of public opinion by candidates with a lot of money from special interests. You can read my customer review of his novel--a fable in the tradition of George Orwell--at amazon.com.
The hero of this novel--a Dick Doran kind of guy named Charlie Coons--brilliantly orchestrates a campaign to have the constituency of Sen. Jo Stephenson, a courageous maverick elected over a big money Republican from Vermont in a special election two years before, lie to all polling inquires.
The cooperative Stephenson backers tell pollsters they like her opponent--the well named Ethan Allen Aiken--precisely because he is against political reforms and for big business domination of politics. Armed with this disinformation, the Aiken campaign produces counterproductive spots that drive undecided voters to Stephenson, hand her a landslide victory, and give pollsters and campaign consultants a nationwide black eye.
That Dick Doran emerged as one of our nation's strongest critics of political polling is an interesting tale. As executive director of the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee in 1969, he recommended a reform package requiring the city committee to endorse candidates based on public opinion polling; it was overwhelmingly voted down by the city's wardleaders, and both Doran and Democratic City Chairman Bill Green resigned their positions.
Green went on to be elected Mayor of Philadelphia in 1979, and appointed Doran as City Representative and Director of Commerce, a position that kept a permanent place for Doran as a part of the city's political/corporate/non-profit establishment; previously he had been head of a major corporate funded non-profit, the Greater Philadelphia First Corporation. It is reasonable to infer from this book that Doran was somewhat torn about his insider status.
It Takes A Villain Is full of cardboard characters who openly brag of the villainy in making big bucks for themselves and subverting the public interest in every way possible. My favorite villain is Dr. Ludwig Controller--a pschiatrist who has become the "Mr. Big" of the Washington lobbyist community--who Coons both admires for his success and wants to destroy as an effective lobbying force.
It is hard to imagine a real-life campaign successfully orchestrating an effort to deceive all the pollsters. It is also hard to imagine them doing it and keeping it such a secret that the opposition campaign relies on the disinformation as the gospel truth.
But this political fable raises the interesting question: have you ever lied to a pollster? Have you ever gotten anyone else to lie to a pollster?
The conventional wisdom has been that pollsters are the good guys, enabling the silent public to speak. But Doran says they merely enable the big money people to manipulate public opinion. Do you agree with this? Does it matter much if the poll is released publicly or kept a secret? Are we better off with more and more publicly released polls then we were when the vast majority of them were secret?