The Pollster
The Power of the Vote: Electing Presidents, Overthrowing Dictators,
and Promoting Democracy Around the World
by Douglas E. Schoen
Morrow. 416 pp. $25.95

Once rooted in states and cities, American political parties used to be organizations to which people actually belonged, not just labels that aspiring politicians sought to wear. Smoke-filled rooms and courthouse rings were the places where parties nominated candidates for office, doled out patronage, and linked citizens to government.

But in the 1970’s, especially within the Democratic party, such local bodies came under attack for being unprincipled and undemocratic, and for failing to represent their constituents. With the help of the mass media, reformers opened up both parties, instituting primary elections to nominate candidates. This effectively destroyed the local organizations and nationalized American politics.

Soon enough, however, candidates discovered that they now needed other kinds of help in running for office. Lacking the specialized skills and sheer amount of information required for modern electoral competition, they turned to a new type of organization and a new breed of operative: the campaign-management firm and the political consultant. In the intervening decades, these have become fixtures on the national political scene.

These firms and their expert professionals can relay constituents’ views more quickly and more accurately than the old party “bosses” ever could. Armed with computerized survey data, consultants identify salient issues, learn how voters judge a candidate, and determine media strategy on a daily basis. As their tools have been put to widespread use, almost everything candidates say, do, and, up to a point, even think on the campaign trail has become scripted in advance.

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Douglas E. Schoen is an emblematic practitioner of the craft. Raised in New York City and educated at Harvard, he founded, with Mark Penn, the campaign-management firm of Penn, Schoen & Berland in 1975. In this memoir he details his long experience in the wide variety of political races and corporate-advertising campaigns in which he participated as both a witness to and an active shaper of the transformation of modern electoral politics.

At home, working almost exclusively for Democrats, Schoen has compiled an impressive list of achievements. He got his start as a pollster in New York City, working on Ed Koch’s successful mayoral run in 1977. Over the next decade, he played a role in races for mayor (Washington, D.C.), governor (Indiana), and U.S. Senate (New Jersey, West Virginia, and Alabama) as well as in corporate campaigns for Texaco, AT&T, Eli Lilly, and AOL.

By the 1990’s, Schoen’s polling-and-consulting firm had become one of the best known and most highly respected in the world, earning him a place in Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection effort and Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000. More recently, working for the senatorial and then gubernatorial bids of Jon Corzine in New Jersey, and for Michael Bloomberg in New York City, he has had the opportunity to work for candidates with especially deep personal pockets.

Schoen has also been involved in the export of American-style polling and campaign-advertising techniques abroad to countries as diverse as Israel, South Korea, and the Dominican Republic. In a number of instances, he reports, he has used polls to help bring foreign autocrats to heel. The most successful case was that of the 2004-5 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where his exit-poll data showed that the democratic opposition possessed a strength and legitimacy greater than what was reflected in the “official” tally.

Elsewhere, by contrast, authoritarian governments bent on falsifying elections results were able to defeat the forces of democracy despite Schoen’s efforts. In the former Yugoslavia, it took a NATO bombing campaign to topple Slobodan Miloševi?. In Venezuela, although Schoen’s 2004 polling convinced him that Hugo Chávez had committed electoral fraud to win a recall election, both Jimmy Carter, who observed the vote, and the international community swung behind Chávez.

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A seasoned insider who has worked in so many places for so many disparate candidates might be expected to eschew strong partisan convictions of his own. Yet Schoen, in telling the story of his own career, does not hesitate to advance a particular agenda for the future of the Democrats, the party he supports. In brief, and again on the basis of polling data, he judges the party to be “still too far to the Left” for its own electoral good.

Even after more than six years of Republican rule, Schoen writes, a large majority of voters remain hostile to core liberal ideas like higher taxes and the redistribution of wealth. In foreign policy, whatever damage the Iraq war may have done to the GOP’s credibility, voters remain nationalistic, patriotic, and concerned about the country’s security. On moral issues, solid majorities cling to traditional beliefs. By all these measures, the Democratic party is out of synch. It cannot hope to win, in Schoen’s assessment, unless it “appeals to the political center, dispenses with [its] fixation on redistribution, addresses values issues, and takes a tough stand on national security.”

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Schoen’s book is a fount of war stories and practical advice, which draws on the wisdom of the political image-making trade. Unfortunately, it never squarely addresses the central objections to that trade: namely, that pollsters and consultants have undermined the authenticity of political races, turning candidates into canned and scripted automatons; that they have greatly constrained the maneuvering room of politicians once in office; and that they have weakened civic involvement in political life.

Not only does Schoen fail to dispel these concerns, he augments them. After reading for the tenth time how he re-packaged, re-framed, and re-sold this or that candidate, one almost begins to believe that the American voter truly is being hoodwinked. If this is not, in fact, the case, it is because, like any good self-promoter, Schoen greatly overestimates the power and prescience of experts like himself. To hear him tell it, he has not been surprised by the outcome of an election in the last 30 years. When his candidates do happen to take it on the chin, it is usually because they did not follow his advice. The few who have lost (they include Al Gore in the U.S. and Shimon Peres in Israel) are chided either for not listening to him or for lacking the necessary drive to prevail.

To the limited extent Schoen attempts to engage critics, he does so by simply asserting that the rise of pollsters and consultants has on balance been a good thing. Polling, he says, permits politicians to be more responsive to their constituents, frees them from the spoils system of patronage-oriented parties, and reduces the likelihood of electoral fraud. The replacement of smoke-filled by computer-filled rooms has thus strengthened democracy, making it more representative and less corrupt.

Whatever truth may lurk in this assertion, it is partial at best and in any case overstated. For one thing, consultants are not the omniscient master manipulators Schoen would have us believe they are, and political races still frequently turn on events that candidates and their handlers cannot foresee and over which they have no control. For another, pollsters and related experts are not always the autonomous operators they imagine themselves to be. Party organizations—now directed from the national rather than the local stage—have been making a comeback in recent years, integrating consultants into their structure not as managers and directors but as subservient staffers.

As for representativeness, here we come back to Schoen’s thoughts on the prospects of the Democratic party. For him, only by returning to Clinton-style centrism will the party stand a chance of capturing a national majority. But he does not address the main barrier to any move in that direction: the party’s fractured constituencies.

On one side are affluent white professionals, many of whom are not only highly secular in their own views but openly disdainful of moral and religious traditionalists; in addition, and despite their own affluence, they tend to applaud populist economic rhetoric. On the other side is a galaxy of minority groups, unionized workers, and social activists; no element of this coalition, either, thrills to centrist appeals or embraces market-based solutions. In foreign affairs, overlapping groups of Democrats regard an assertive national-security policy with, to put it delicately, a jaundiced eye.

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Thus, rather than adopting Schoen’s favored approach of moving toward the political middle, the Democrats are tempted by three alternative strategies. One, advocated most strenuously by George Lakoff, a liberal activist who teaches at Berkeley, is simply to alter the words in which Democratic policies are offered to voters without altering the policies themselves. Another, related approach is to find candidates committed to the Left-liberal agenda but bearing tough-seeming and preferably military credentials à la Virginia Senator James Webb. Finally, some Democrats still believe that old-fashioned populism of the “people-versus-the-powerful” kind can help them capture more lower- and middle-class voters.

To be sure, each of these moves would entice the Democrats to focus more on what is wrong with the American public than with what is wrong with their party, and could lead to the dire electoral fate that Schoen predicts. But that is another way of saying that the public is not so easy to manipulate or to fool after all. And it also suggests that the outcome of the 2008 race remains very much in doubt.

Still, of one thing we can be sure. Whatever strategy is ultimately adopted by Democratic candidates, Schoen himself, in his latest post as an election commentator for Fox News, will be ready to explain it all to us with his customary verve and confidence. He has now embarked on a path, blazed by James Carville, from political consultant to political pundit. To judge by this self-heralding book, it is a role he will relish.