The Poll of Polls

TIME Senior Correspondent John Steele is assessing the performance of professional pollsters in this election year. His observations on Wisconsin:

SENATOR George McGovern's smashing victory in the Wisconsin primary election hoisted two important signals for politicians, as far as the polls are concerned.

> An underdog presidential candidate need not become disheartened even though he runs far behind the leaders in the national public-opinion polls. Often such polls bear no resemblance at all to the outcome of individual state primaries.

> There is no bandwagon psychology in national polls when it comes to state primaries. If there had been one in Wisconsin, McGovern would have run far behind Senators Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey, and he would have trailed Governor George Wallace as well.

In McGovern's case, his performance in the national polls since the announcement of his candidacy 15 months ago has been downright dismal. The Gallup organization, in all of its national soundings, has shown McGovern running between a minuscule 3% and 6% when pitted against his rivals for the nomination. Indeed, until December the Gallup poll did not even pit McGovern in head-to-head polls with President Nixon and Wallace on the grounds that the voters' awareness of his candidacy was so low that no realistic appraisal of his strength was obtainable. Louis Harris polls show a quite similar finding, placing McGovern with only 7% of Democratic and independent preferences.

Wallace, too, runs far behind his Florida primary victory and his strong Wisconsin showing in the national polls to date. Muskie topped the national lists until last month, when he fell behind Humphrey in the Gallup poll.

Graham Bright of the Harris organization emphasizes that Wisconsin and the three other state primaries now completed do not represent "a microcosm of the whole country." He cites the factor of heavy Republican crossover voting in the Wisconsin Democratic contest, mostly for Wallace and McGovern. Such a cross-over is not reflected in Harris polls, since only Democratic and independent voters are tabulated. Similar polls taken by Gallup are limited to Democrats alone.

Oliver Quayle, who did extensive private polling in Wisconsin, caught the McGovern trend there. His surveys found McGovern steadily climbing from a disheartening 9% in January to a respectable 19% in early March and, by late March, to a winning margin of 28% in the twelve-candidate field. McGovern actually took 30% of the vote. In a bobtailed telephone survey taken ten days before for the state AFL-CIO organization, Quayle was less successful in catching the Wallace surge.

"The national figures might make sense--nationally," Quayle explains. "McGovern has campaigned intensively only in a few states thus far. Suddenly the people of Wisconsin got to know him. But what's that got to do with Nebraska, Idaho and other states? Muskie and Humphrey run well in the national polls not necessarily because they are strong, but because they are better known. That's McGovern's problem." Quayle believes it likely that the national polls will soon reflect a McGovern upturn. That would mean a reverse bandwagon effect, with the national polls following the primary results.

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