| Polling Power Former presidential pollster Dotty Lynch brings political
expertise to SOC BY MATT GETTY For School of Communication (SOC) executive in residence Dotty Lynch, the best insight into Washington has always come from looking far beyond the beltway. “I’ve always been very intrigued by politics from the point of view of voters,” says the former presidential pollster and CBS News senior political editor. “I’ve always wanted to understand how voters see issues and make decisions.” 
Photo by Jeff Watts
That perspective defined a nearly fifteen-year political polling career during which Lynch became the first woman pollster for a presidential campaign, uncovered the “gender gap” in American politics, and helped put the first female vice-presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket. In that time, she saw firsthand the power public-opinion surveys hold over political campaigns. Her polling work with Cambridge Survey Research in 1976, for instance, helped shape Jimmy Carter’s first presidential run. When surveys revealed voters were ready for a Washington outsider but still associated southerners with bigotry, she recalls, Cambridge Survey Research advised Carter to highlight his outsider status while positioning himself against noted southern racist George Wallace in the primaries. The strategy took the little-known Georgia governor all the way to the White House. “It’s a powerful role to play in a campaign because everybody sitting around the table has an opinion on what the candidate should do,” she says. “But we’re sitting there with the print-out they paid money for. We’ve got the data.” At times, that data put Lynch in awkward positions. “Sometimes you have to tell people they need to go on diets,” she chuckles, noting that polls indicate voters see overweight candidates as “out of control.” Sometimes you even have to say “no” to Frank Sinatra, as Lynch did during Mario Cuomo’s 1977 New York City mayoral campaign. “Sinatra wanted to campaign for him, and we had to explain that he had a very high negative image,” she recalls, noting that the crooner’s rumored Mafia ties could have spelled disaster for the campaign. “The last thing Cuomo needed was another Italian Mafia joke.” But Lynch’s data also transformed American politics itself. When she headed the polling unit for the Democratic National Committee in 1981, she searched the polls for any “ray of light” for the Democratic party after Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over Carter. What she found, a large disparity between men and women voters on key issues and voting patterns, became known as the “gender gap ” and has grown so central to politics today that no election year seems complete without talk of “Soccer Moms” or “NASCAR Dads.” “The assumption had always been that women derived their political attitudes from their fathers and husbands,” says Lynch. Though there had been talk “here and there” about how John F. Kennedy’s looks might have affected the election, she explains, “there wasn’t any systematic look at this issue.” Besides becoming part of the political lexicon, the “gender gap” helped Lynch and a group of women activist friends known as the “A-Team” shatter a major political barrier in 1984. After launching her own polling firm a year earlier, Lynch used survey data to help convince the Democratic party to select Geraldine Ferraro as Walter Mondale’s vice presidential candidate. “We needed to show that it wasn’t just a good thing to do, but that it was a smart thing to do,” she says. “The polls showed that, one, it wouldn’t be a negative, and, two, it could add as much as 2 to 3 percent.” Though Ferraro never became vice president, Lynch is still happy with the way the “gender gap” has helped highlight issues important to women voters in elections. Ironically, though the growing power of polling made this shift in political thought possible, it also led Lynch away from politics shortly after the Mondale-Ferraro defeat. “I started to find that too often I’d ask a candidate, ‘What’s your opinion on abortion?’ and they’d say, ‘Well it depends on what the polls say,’” says Lynch, who sees polling as a tool for shaping messages rather than policies. “I’d walk out of their office and think, ‘Do I want to work for this person? I’m not even sure I’d vote for them.’” This, combined with an offer from CBS News, led Lynch from politics to journalism. Since joining CBS in the mid-1980s, she’s brought her expertise on voting behavior to the coverage of 5 presidential campaigns, 10 national political conventions, and 5 midterm elections. This fall she brought that expertise to AU, where her years probing attitudes outside the beltway make her a unique asset for students wrestling with journalism inside the beltway. “I’m kind of a hybrid,” she explains. “I’ve done polling both for candidates and for news organization, so I hope to help students understand how the political and journalistic worlds intersect.” 
Photo courtesy of Dotty Lynch
Lynch shares a laugh with her former client, one-time presidential hopeful Gary Hart during a recent book signing. Though she traded party politics for impartial reporting, Lynch still sees her work providing a public service. Still acting as consultant for CBS News, she’ll be sitting on the network’s decision desk on election night. As she has for the last three election years, she’ll use her analytical skills not to shape strategy for one candidate or another, but rather to provide objectivity for the very public she’s studied for so long. “I’m always going to have that tension between being an analyst and being an activist,” says Lynch. “But you owe it to the public to be fair and objective.” That’s not to say she doesn’t have an opinion or two on how this year’s election might pan out. “I’m pretty sure Democrats are going to have a good night,” she says. “Whether it’s good enough to take over the House and the Senate I’m not so sure. The Senate races are just way too close to call, but the House right now looks like it’s tending Democratic, and the 15 seats the Democrats need are definitely within reach.” And if they don’t have that ‘good night,’ it will likely be because their strategy didn’t take full advantage of the power of the polls. “All of the polling indicates that the public is very sour on Washington, very sour on incumbents, very sour on George Bush,” Lynch explains. “What [the Democrats] have done—which wouldn’t have been my advice—is to go with a general change message. They’ve had little bits and pieces here and there. Plans to get out of Iraq, benchmarks, Joe Biden does an op-ed piece, but there was no moment like the Republicans had in ’94, standing on the Capitol steps with the ‘Contract with America.’ If they don’t recapture at least one house, there’s going to be a lot of recriminations about that . . . I think they would have been better off with at least a broader brush positive agenda.” Whether or not she’s right, come Nov. 8, Lynch will know exactly where to look for the answers—the exit polls. |
