Polling and Policy: Pollster Joel Benenson Discusses the Role of Polling in Setting Presidential Agendas

Joel Benenson is a Founding Partner and President of Benenson Strategy Group. He was Chief Pollster and a Senior Strategist on both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He has also done polling for a diverse range of organizations, from AARP and Clean Energy Works to ESPN and Paramount.

As we move out of the most recent presidential election cycle and begin President Obama’s second term, how does your job transition from the campaign to the White House?

When you’re in a campaign, there are a lot more moving strategic pieces. You have one Election Day and your job is to get to 51 percent of the vote. When you’re working for an office holder, on the other hand, your focus becomes whatever their focus is. I’ll never tell anybody what position to take on an issue; that’s their decision. My job as the pollster is to tell them how to persuade the greatest number of people to their side of the argument. I always tell anyone I work for that from the time they hire me.

Whether you’re debating immigration or tax policy, deficits or gun control issues, you have to have a clear argument. You need to find the most persuasive argument you can make to get the greatest number of people to agree with you. So it becomes – I don’t want to say a little less proactive because that’s not really true – it’s just proactive in a different way. You have different goals and you change how you define winning changes. You’re not focused on 51 percent on Election Day anymore. Outside a campaign, winning is ultimately about persuading the greatest number of people to your side of a given argument.

Does your polling work play a big role in the president’s major speeches, like the State of the Union for instance?

I rarely talk about specific processes, but typically my work is less focused around a specific speech and more around a set of topics that are going to be the issues of the day being debated in Washington. The messaging work we do is to make sure that the president is using his most persuasive argument. He has any number of reasons why he’s supporting something. Whatever issue you poll, whether it’s early childhood education or raising the minimum wage, he has reasons why he’s doing it. He needs to know what the strongest argument he could be making is. Knowing that is valuable.

You recently received a great deal of publicity surrounding a climate change poll you did for the League of Conservation Voters. The president also emphasized climate change in his State of the Union address. Did those results prompt the president to emphasize climate change in his speech, or did they just strengthen a point he already planned to make?

No, the report certainly didn’t drive it. It was not related to the president’s decision to emphasize climate change in the speech. There may have been a common interest, but climate change and energy are issues that the president has been talking about for a long time; this period in 2013 is not the first time he’s addressed it. Climate change is an issue for which he has well-formed views and for which he has been making persuasive arguments.

Obviously the fight isn’t over yet. We’ll continue to, if asked, work to keep strengthening the argument for climate change legislation. The League of Conservation Voters had its own reasons to examine public opinion on climate change. They’ve got a constituent desire to create a sense of urgency around this issue, and their messaging serves that purpose well.

Just after the Newtown, Connecticut shootings, national support for changes to gun control laws seemed to gain traction. However, public outcry seems to have died down in the months since. Do you believe the tragedy caused a temporary shift in public opinion, or do you see the potential for a more permanent change in national attitudes about guns?

I don’t think the issue is dying down; I think people are asking some of the wrong questions in polls. I think there is a misperception on the part of a lot of American voters about what a lot of the current gun control laws actually say and do, and how the proposals being suggested would actually change gun policy. There’s broad support for what the President has put on the table. However, there’s also confusion; a lot of people in America actually believe that we already have laws that require background checks on every gun sale, and the fact is we don’t. So I don’t think the support for those reforms has ebbed at all. I think the support is pretty palpable, but people are unsure how to direct that support. Furthermore, the issue of the day can change rapidly, for instance – as the president mentioned in his speech – we’re certainly going to be headed toward another big fiscal and budgetary debate in a matter of weeks, so some of the debate will shift to that.

Do your polls tend to focus more on the policy angle or the political angle of specific issues?

Both. You have to understand what is beneath the surface that is shaping the opinions, beliefs, and attitudes of the American voters in order to persuade them. So you have to consider both policy and politics; you have to look at it through the voter’s prism, from their perspective, to understand them. You’re not going to persuade them if you’re not addressing what they’re bringing to the table. So you poll with both in mind, and try not only to take the public’s temperature, but to really understand their opinions on some deeper level. You can do that by asking meaningful questions and trying to quantify the answers, but you have to be sure that what you learned qualitatively is backed by accurate data analysis. Your most persuasive arguments should be well informed by that.

Feature photo: cc/Rhodes