Merv Field is one of the grand old pollers of the 20th century. He worked for George Gallup in the 1930s and founded his own polling organization in California shortly after World War II. In 1948, he -- along with Gallup and the other "scientific pollers" of the time -- miscalled the presidential race (Field in California, Gallup nationwide), but survived that debacle to become a major political force. Field was to California what Gallup was to the country at large.
As head of the only major public policy polling firm in California for years, whose subscribers included many of the major newspapers in the state, Field was devastated when the Los Angeles Times decided to establish its own polling operation in 1978. Not only was there a loss of revenue, as the Times would no longer subscribe, there was a competitor who might cause other papers to cancel their subscriptions and rely instead on information from the new California poll.
When I interviewed Field in 1991, 13 years after the advent of the Times Poll (as part of my research for The Super Pollsters*), he was still critical of the polling staff at the newspaper, saying about Bud Lewis, the poll director at the newspaper who had recently died, that "he was no methodologist . . . it took him a few years to get his feet wet, and then he died, and his assistants weren't that strong." He said of Susan Pinkus, the current director of the Times Poll (but then the assistant director who had filled in after Lewis died until a replacement arrived), "She's a nice gal, but in over her head."
Over the past dozen years, one might expect that disdain to have dissipated. But a news release last week, authored by Mark DiCamillo, current director of the Field Poll, and retired founder Field himself, suggests that Field has not yet mellowed over the loss of the Times.
The news release was in response to a Times article, written by staff writer David Lauter, which analyzed why the Field and Times polls differed in their recent portrayal of California opinion about the gubernatorial recall election. Lauter's piece made it clear there was no criticism of the Field Poll, and suggested the differences might be due to margin of error, different timing of the polls, question order and wording, and sample differences (each polling organization reports on "likely voters" but has its own classification system). Lauter pointed out "the two polls are more alike than different" and that the two polling groups "have long track records of accurately gauging California elections."
The response by the Field Poll was not as generous. Although ostensibly just a "different take" on why polls differ, the release soon made it clear that in the authors' views, the polls differed because one was wrong -- and it was not the one conducted by Field. The authors dismissed the "standard explanations" of margin of error and different timing of the polls (and ignored possible differences in question order and wording), which Lauter had suggested could be the causes of the poll differences. Instead, they asserted that first "other aspects of each poll need to be considered."
Those other aspects turned out to be the racial composition of the Times sample, which had more blacks and Asians/others than what the Times had measured in the 2000 exit polls. DiCamillo and Field demanded to know more details about the racial distribution of the sample, whether the Times weighted the numbers to bring them "into conformity with historical voting patterns" and "if not, why not?"
Never mind that the weighting demanded by the authors, as though it were the gold standard of polling practices, is actually a controversial approach that could well backfire. What struck me is that the authors are still trying to portray the Los Angeles Times Poll as somehow inept, not up to the standards of the Field Poll. At one point they note that the Times Poll uses a different measure from the one used by Field to classify voters as liberal, moderate and conservative. "From our perspective, we are inclined to believe that The Field Poll's procedure produces a closer approximation of the actual ideological leanings of Californians than the one employed by the Times Poll."
Well, they may "believe" their measure is better, but they know there is no scientific proof for that belief, because the concepts themselves are too subjective to define precisely. And to include the assertion of a superior measure as part of their "different take" on why the polls differ illustrates the kind of petty sniping they were engaged in a dozen years ago.
Enough already.
*For a more extended discussion of the conflict between Field and the Times Poll, see Chapter 7, "The California Divide," in my book on The Super Pollsters (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1992; paperback version, 1995).