Luntz's reasoning is thought-provoking, and sounds kind of sensible -- except that the polls leading up to the 1992 election were actually pretty on target. Just days before the voters went to the polls, ABC had Perot with 18 percent. A Harris Poll had Perot at 17 percent. He wound up with 19 percent.

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Some days after his appearance at the Sperling Breakfast, I ran into another journalist who was at the table that morning. Didn't it bother him, I wondered, that Luntz offered no numbers to back up his assertions and that he said he was using the press to pass a message to Bush, regardless of how silly that message was?

"Luntz is different," he told me. "He's not a regular pollster. He's more interpretive."

But the whole point of polling is to collect data. It is not a perfect science but, done properly and explained well, polls yield hard numbers that can be discussed.

What Luntz does is something else: scientific man-on-the-street interviews. And regardless of how scientific the samples are, how serious can one take the results when there are no numbers to point to and the moderator happily admits he's doing what he can to aid a specific party?

"We call people pollsters when they poll," Moore says. "Why don't we all call Luntz a focus-groupster?" Probably because that wouldn't sound nearly as good on TV.

salon.com | May 26, 2000

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