Polling Firm’s Reprimand Rattles News Media, Essay Example

Atlanta — For Strategic Vision L.L.C., as for many polling companies, it was a regular practice: for five years the company sent out the results of its surveys on leading political races around the country, and they made their way into blog posts, articles and national television coverage.

But news organizations are rethinking their use of Strategic Vision’s numbers after the company was reprimanded last week by a professional association of pollsters for failing to disclose “essential facts” about its methods.

The reprimand has hit a nerve among those in the political world who feed on poll numbers, prompting intense scrutiny of everything from the distribution of digits in the company’s poll results to its claim that it is based in Atlanta. Nate Silver, a statistical analyst who writes FiveThirtyEight, a blog on polling, has suggested in a series of posts that the company’s data may well be fabricated, an assertion denied by David E. Johnson, the founder and chief executive of Strategic Vision.

“We expect to be fully vindicated,” Mr. Johnson said in a telephone interview this week.

But the controversy has also led to a critical examination of the indiscriminate use of poll numbers. Strategic Vision’s polls have been cited by numerous news organizations, including The Associated Press, The Washington Post, MSNBC, Fox News and, on at least three occasions, The New York Times, even though the company has repeatedly failed to provide supporting data and the methodology for its surveys. (The Times generally avoids using national and state polls that do not meet its standards.)

“I think that this episode ought to be a wake-up call to a lot of us,” said Mark Blumenthal, a former Democratic pollster who now edits Pollster.com. “We live in a news environment where a combination of cable news and Web sites of every imaginable variety have an insatiable appetite for polling numbers.”

Mr. Blumenthal said Mr. Johnson was not the only pollster who did not readily release his supporting data or methodology.

Strategic Vision was founded by Mr. Johnson and his wife, Laura Ward, as a Republican-leaning mom-and-pop public relations company in 2002. In 2004, the company branched out into polling, focusing on Senate and presidential races. One of its clients is the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, based in Indiana, which supports the use of government vouchers to send children to private schools.

Like many of its competitors, Strategic Vision issued polls it said were self-financed, as a way of attracting attention and clients. The company was successful in part because its polling was prolific and was often among the earliest on a given race, like the one in which Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition, ran for lieutenant governor of Georgia in 2006.

Early on, questions were raised about how such a small firm could conduct so many self-financed polls, but Mr. Johnson, a frequent commentator on Fox News, said they accounted for the company’s entire marketing budget. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution repeatedly requested supporting documentation for the poll results but never received any, said James A. Mallory, senior managing editor. A spokeswoman for CNN said it had declined for years to use Strategic Vision’s polls.

In the interview, Mr. Johnson said some of the supporting documentation, including demographic breakdowns of poll respondents, was available but had never been requested by The Journal-Constitution.

The reprimand, by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, stemmed from an investigation it conducted after many polls showed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton trailing in the run-up to the 2008 Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, where she went on to win. The association requested minimal information from 21 polling companies that, according to its professional guidelines, all polls should disclose, including sample size, response rate and polling dates.

Strategic Vision was the only company that did not provide the information, prompting a complaint filed with the association.

Mr. Johnson variously told reporters that he had not received the request (although two Federal Express receipts were produced to show that it had been delivered), that he had provided the information or that he had declined to provide it until the complainant’s identity was disclosed. In the interview this week, he said the request “was not in a friendly manner, and since we’re not a member we opted not to respond.”

Peter Miller, president of the association, said an “expression of objection” like the one it issued about Strategic Vision was not limited to members, because “we have a duty to uphold the credibility of the profession.” The association has issued two other such censures in the last 12 years, Mr. Miller said.

The controversy has made some news organizations and bloggers skittish about using Strategic Vision’s numbers. The Hill, which covers politics in Washington, will no longer use them.

Mr. Johnson said his polls were conducted through live interviews, which are more expensive than automated polls. He has threatened legal action against the association and Mr. Silver, the poll blogger who questioned his data. But he declined in the interview to respond to Mr. Silver’s criticism, calling it absurd.

As for the accusation that the company’s claim to be based in Atlanta was misleading, Mr. Johnson acknowledged that the main Strategic Vision office was in Blairsville, Ga., 115 miles away, but said the difference was “semantic.”