ABSTRACT
President John F. Kennedy didn’t want the public to know he was using pollingdata to develop a better strategy for civil rights issues; in those days, referring to surveys was seen as an obvious weakness in a president. Most Americans believed then that the highest representatives of the people were elected to public offices as trustees to use their own judgment and not to depend on pollsters-political fortunetellers. Politics has changed since the early 1960s, and more people seem to accept that presidents should respectfully respond to polls reflecting the opinions of their constituencies. President Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, learned from the polls not to raise the Vietnam War as an issue in the 1964 presidential campaign if he wanted to be reelected. President Richard M. Nixon turned to polling as part of the art of presidential politics in bringing many of his domestic decisions in line with the people’s opinions during his five-year tenure. President Jimmy Carter got help from survey specialists and was the first president to witness one of his pollsters, Patrick Caddell, achieve celebrity status. Unfortunately, Carter’s reelection team made serious mistakes when Caddell underestimated the strengths of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, who won the 1980 election. Despite some accounts, Reagan persistently used national opinion polls to avoid making obvious mistakes on domestic policies. George H. W. Bush, who succeeded Reagan as president, did not regularly use surveys and suffered a loss of popularity over the economy. However, Bill Clinton, who became president in 1993, gave opinion polls serious consideration throughout his eight years in the White House. Moreover, he gave some of his poll-savvy senior advisers like Dick Morris direct access to the Oval Office. Since 2001, President George W. Bush
has considered polling on issues important to the American people part of his domestic strategy. He gets help from a polling center in Texas that conducts national polls four or five times a month (Judson, 2002; Sobel, 1993).
