"In Elections, We Deal with Choices, Not Absolutes"

"The job of the public polls is to determine what a situation is," says Pat Caddell, the President's pollster. "But my job really is to find ways to help change that result. Campaigning is a game where you look for any small edge that could be critical."

Trying to find that edge for Jimmy Carter, Caddell has used some offbeat techniques. During the conventions, he wired up more than 100 "focus group" volunteers around the country with a kind of emotion-revealing polygraph to monitor their reactions to Ronald Reagan's and Carter's acceptance speeches, noting which passages excited them and which stirred no response. But the real key to his operation is almost constant polling, surveys remarkable for their numbers, length and depth.

A typical national poll will question fewer than 1,500 people in the entire country. This week 1,000 people in New York State will be interviewed in person for an hour each. The interviewers have been known to fire as many as 150 questions at each subject. The reason: Caddell is trying for a full understanding of the mind-set of the typical voter, and even more, searching for small clues as to what could change it.

So far, the polling makes Caddell optimistic. Carter, he believes, has one huge advantage: the simple fact that he is the President. "This is my third presidential campaign," Caddell notes (George McGovern signed up as the first client of his newly organized Cambridge Survey Research a few months before Caddell graduated from Harvard in 1972), "and I've been on both sides. I'd rather run an incumbent's campaign than a challenger's, at any odds."

Why? To begin with, says Caddell, voters these days "are both questioning and harsh" about all politicians. "A certain skepticism has been built in over the past half-decade, since Watergate." One result is that voters are extremely dubious about the ability of a challenger to do a better job than even a widely unpopular incumbent.

Says Caddell: "People view a presidential election very differently from elections for Senator or Governor. They take a presidential vote much more seriously. Very few will cast a frivolous vote, a protest vote." And they have difficulty imagining anyone who is not already doing so exercising the power of the presidency. One example: early in the 1976 campaign, when he first worked for Carter, Caddell questioned a group of 100 voters and found that 60% were for the former Georgia Governor. But after they were questioned for half an hour on what kind of policies they thought he would pursue, 10% wound up choosing Incumbent Gerald Ford--because, in Caddell's interpretation, they had trouble visualizing Carter in the Oval Office.

Now that Carter is there, Caddell thinks, the magic of the White House will work for him and against Reagan. Beyond the burden that any challenger carries, says Caddell, "when you look at the data on Reagan, you just want to salivate. A lot of people have enormous doubts about him, about his judgment, his experience and his concern for individuals in society. He is viewed as an extreme ideologue." Also, Caddell adds, though the issue did not trouble Reagan in the Republican primaries, many voters still worry about his age: "There are just a lot of people who are concerned about a 70-year-old learning to be President."

Reagan has strengths too, as Caddell readily concedes. Many voters who view him as an ideologue nonetheless find him personally amiable--and besides that, a man of strength, conviction and decisiveness. What is more, Carter has grave weaknesses. Caddell insists that most voters still give the President high personal ratings, viewing him as honest, trustworthy, hardworking, "overall a good and decent man. That is very critical to the electorate." But he grants that many of the same voters take such a dim view of Carter's competence and job performance that "you would think they were talking about two totally separate people."

Consequently, says Caddell, "we have to make clear that in elections we deal with choices, not absolutes." Caddell claims the election is a choice between two men, not a referendum on Carter's first four years. Translation: every Democratic speaker hammers away at Reagan on every possible occasion--and Caddell counsels them to have no fear that they will create a backlash of sympathy for the Republican. Says he: "The success of negative campaigns in American politics since 1978 has been almost unabated. There has been almost no backfire."

Caddell is consulted on which states to hit hardest,

which issues to stress and avoid, when and where TV spots should be shown, and even where Carter should go and when.

This week, for example, the President will fly to Raritan, N.J., to deliver a speech, partly because a Caddell phone survey gave him a strengthening chance to carry the state. Says National Campaign Director Tim Kraft:

"Pat is at the very core of the operation."

Adds Caddell, and no one disputes him:

"The surveys are the driving engine of the campaign."

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