The New Technology

The American voter in 1972 may well be visited by a public opinion analyst who will never ask how he is going to vote, but will go away knowing precisely how he will. He may later receive a letter--written and signed by a computer--addressed to him by name, repeating his surname in the body of the letter, and ending with what appears to be the authentic signature of a candidate. The letter may mention the voter's concern for the environment, his wife's ethnic heritage or the fact that he has three children in college. The voter may even answer the telephone and hear a familiar voice saying: "Good evening, this is President Nixon speaking to you by way of a recording."

What the voter will be experiencing this year is the new political technology, a combination of sophisticated polling techniques and computerization that has already met with startling success. Employing such methods, Hubert Humphrey won re-election to the Senate in 1970 by one of the largest margins of his career; in a year when voter totals were down, the turnout in Democratic districts in Minnesota rose from 7% to 20%. Similarly, Senator Quentin Burdick of North Dakota was thought to be in a close race, but he turned to the technologists and won by almost a 2-to-l margin. In Nashville, Tenn., skeptical but desperate backers of former Senator Albert Gore utilized the computer technique, and Gore carried the city. "If we had done the same thing statewide," says Gore's Nashville manager James Sasser, "he'd have been re-elected."

The magic of the new technology is that it allows the candidate to identify and respond to the demands of the electorate as never before. At the push of a button, he can command a list of the names of voters who support him--and thus require only his limited attention--or a "sway" list of independent and undecided voters, who should get more of his time. Properly programmed, the computer can identify subgroups by occupation, ethnic origin, even hobbies, then dispatch "personal" letters, circulars or telephone messages as needed. Surveys have shown that personal messages, even when identified as coming from a computer, are highly effective and often cheaper than television spots. One firm charges from $10,000 to $13,500 per congressional district; a one-minute TV commercial can cost as much as $20,000.

The mechanics of the new political technology are an artful blending of the old and the new. Once signed on by a candidate, most successful computer-data firms begin by lining up volunteers to obtain voter-registration lists, which are transmitted to punch cards. These lists are supplemented with the names of the non-registered, who then become the target of a massive telephone survey. In 1970, for example, Valentine, Sherman & Associates, the firm that worked on Humphrey's return to the Senate, called and classified people in more than 750,000 homes in Minnesota.

Leverage Issue. By asking such questions as occupation of the head of the household, number of children or senior citizens and union affiliations, the canvassers put together a composite of each family voting unit. Questions about party preference (whom the husband voted for in the last election and whether others voted the same way) help reveal how the members of the household feel about a candidate. The answers are fed into the computer, and permit the candidate to reach any number of voter groupings. Remarkably few of those questioned --around 8%--refused to cooperate.

Lengthy, wide-ranging interviews that can be analyzed by computer are another device of the new technology; they may be used separately or in combination with the telephone canvass.

"It isn't enough to ask someone how he will vote," says Tully Plesser, president of Cambridge Opinion Studies Inc., one of the more successful firms in the field. "He may not tell you the truth, he may try to foul up your survey, he may tell you what he thinks you want to hear and then behave the opposite way in the voters' booth." Instead, Plesser and others like him attempt to determine the "leverage" issue, the issue that may decide how an individual votes. The end of the Viet Nam War may be important to the voter, Plesser says, but prayer in the schools may be a leverage issue. The voter may like George McGovern better on all the important issues, but still vote for Richard Nixon if he is right on the leverage issues.

Accordingly, voters may be asked to describe their concept of a good President. If they say, for example, that a President's concern for minority groups is important to them, they will be asked to rate that on a scale of one to five in importance and then to evaluate the candidates in relation to that factor. If a voter volunteers that he is for a particular candidate, the poller may ask him how he would talk his neighbor out of voting for that candidate in order to test just how solidly the voter is committed and to find out what the candidate's weak spots are.

Undoubtedly the new technicians like Plesser and former Hubert Humphrey Press Secretary Norman Sherman of Valentine, Sherman will play a major role in the '72 elections and perhaps a decisive one thereafter. It is not an altogether reassuring vista. George Orwell would have no difficulty imagining a gray election year in the future in which a nationwide computer network, having probed, polled and classified the American electorate, projects how the public would vote. On that basis, it would then appoint the next President--without a single ballot being cast.

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