MARGE INOVERA:

Bush Aide Watches Polls and Public Perceptions (JIM RUTENBERG, 6/12/04, NY Times)

Matthew Dowd, President Bush's chief campaign strategist, is not just the man who conducts the president's polling. He also works to control public perceptions about where the presidential race stands, perhaps more aggressively than many other campaign aides in his position.

When Mr. Bush has risen sharply in the polls, Mr. Dowd has stepped in pre-emptively with memorandums widely sent to Republican officials, supporters and journalists to dampen expectations and warn that the country remained closely divided. "President Bush's approval numbers will again fall back to more realistic levels fairly quickly," he wrote in a publicly released memo when the President had particularly high ratings after major combat operations ended in Iraq last spring.

When campaign officials worry public polls make the President's situation look too grim, Mr. Dowd also steps in, most vociferously when he believes the grimness to be in error. The most recent example of that came this week, when a new poll from The Los Angeles Times showed Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts leading President Bush among registered voters by seven percentage points - a lead just beyond the poll's margin of error. Mr. Dowd publicly and sharply called the poll a "mess," prompting a public spat with the news organization's polling director about the nitty-gritty of polling methodology.

To be sure, polls are often the blood that flows through the body politic, helping set perceptions about the state of a campaign, and the Kerry camp also frequently sends out memorandums, usually to reporters, that try to put public polls in the most favorable terms. In one of his commercials Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential contender, even says that the nation is going "in the wrong direction," picking up the language of a standard survey question used to measure public discontent in what seemed at least in part devised to get voters to say the same thing to pollsters.

Still, analysts said, Mr. Dowd is exceptional. They described him as creating a new role for a presidential campaign as an expert polling director offering a more aggressive running commentary on the various public polls, one that often goes out not just to reporters, but also to Web sites and to six million supporters via e-mail.

His deconstruction of the LA Times poll was pretty amusing.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 12, 2004 4:57 PM