Presidential campaigns offer the nation a welcome opportunity to learn about itself, and to illuminate and (sometimes) settle all sorts of issues, from busing to pot to unemployment policy. This election year, with its long calendar of primaries and crowded field of candidates, presents a special challenge to voters--and to journalists. To help chart public attitudes on the candidates and the issues, TIME will augment its own coverage with public opinion polling surveys.

Our partner in this enterprise, continuing an association begun in 1972, is Yankelovich, Skelly and White, Inc., the New York-based research firm. It will conduct six surveys for us, three during the primaries and three more following the party conventions. Building on the body of data gathered up in two years of quarterly TIME Soundings, the last of which appears in this issue, these polls will not only rank the candidates but also plumb changing voter attitudes. The goal is to study America while it is evaluating the candidates.

Another part of our 1976 planning took place in Washington last month, when staffers from New York and correspondents from round the country met for two days to compare notes. The preparations included talking politics with some old pros: Gerald Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Senator Edward Kennedy and the chairmen of the Republican and Democratic national committees, Howard Callaway and Robert Strauss. Even before then, most of the leading candidates had met with TIME'S editors in New York.

As in 1972, TIME'S correspondents have divided the U.S. into five political regions. Together with our Washington bureau and roving National Political Correspondent Robert Ajemian, they will file their observations each week to Nation Senior Editor Marshall Loeb and staff in New York. Loeb is looking forward to the challenge of tracking the political year in print, an assignment that he finds "uniquely suited to our capabilities of analysis and summary."

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