A generation ago, Vance Packard disingenuously peddled the proposition that sinister advertising researchers were clandestinely persuading consumers to buy products they didn't want. The alarming subtitle of David Moore's book suggests that he is advancing a parallel thesis in the domain of politics. Fortunately, he does not and cannot make this case for the bulk of political polling, which is done honestly and reported honestly (if not always reliably) in the news media.

These public polls get scant attention from Moore, though he begins with the irrelevant case history of a silly sex survey, The Hite Report, and ends with a review of the well-known evidence that people give different answers when questions are worded differently or asked in different sequences. His focus, rather, is on private polls, which are, of course, merely one of the tricks in the bag of today's political consultants.

Essentially, and at its best, The Super Pollsters is a series of five profiles of individuals who have become known for doing polls for political parties and presidential candidates: Patrick Caddell, Peter Hart, Richard Wirthlin, Robert Teeter, and Louis Harris (who modestly claims that he reinvents polling every five years). The book provides a useful and detailed history of their successes and failures in analyzing voter opinions, especially in primary races, and describes several instances in which they have stepped over the dividing line from analysis to advice and advocacy.

Most private polls stay private; they are leaked only when there is something to gain. For example, Reagan's campaign manager, John Sears, withheld Wirthlin's polls from the press when they showed Gerald Ford gaining on Reagan in the 1976 primary campaign.

In 1960, JFK asked Harris to show Henry Luce his private polls, which showed him running neck and neck with Nixon, to dissuade Luce from running a Life article about JFK's Catholicism that might have influenced the voting in Nixon's favor. The article did not run. Moore also alleges that years later Harris, because of his Kennedy connection, held back in his syndicated column on reporting positive news about Jimmy Carter during the 1980 primary race, in which Senator Edward Kennedy was a contender.

In the 1972 primary race, Caddell told the press that his client, McGovern, was within "striking distance" of Humphrey, who actually had a 30-point lead.

Moore also mentions cases that would leave most professional researchers aghast. Peter Hart, for example, used a single focus-group interview of fifteen Democratic voters to come up with the insight that those who leaned to Mondale in the 1984 campaign thought he was reliable and experienced, but though Gary Hart was untested and immature.

Wirthlin is very secretive about his research methods, although, as in the case of his "Hierarchical-Values-Map," they appear to be overblown terms for widely used techniques. In 1984, Wirthlin told Moore, Mondale "owned" such topics as Abortion, Fairness, Fair Taxes, Education, and Caring About People. "The Leadership box was still up for grabs." Such a simplistic way of defining the complexities of human attitudes and feelings would probably never pass muster in the tougher world of marketing research (let alone that of social research), but for political polling purposes it seems to have rung the bell. Mondale owned World Peace but Reagan owned Strengthen Defense Preparedness. The two were reconciled in a commercial, "Bear in the Woods," that raised the Russian threat and suggested that strong defense meant peace. Apparently Wirthlin believes this commercial did the trick, "and that's why Reagan won the election in 1984." One does not know whether to marvel more at the presumption or at the naivete. B the, Reagan did win the election.

Ask members of the public opinion research profession who the "super pollsters" are and they will probably respond with the names of such leaders and innovators as Paul Lazarsfeld, Samuel Stouffer, Rensis Likert, Clyde Hart, George Gallup, Elmo Roper, Archibald Crossley, and others of the founding generation. Gallup does find his way into David Moore's book, but just barely, because his work was in the public arena, and Moore is writing about the invisible, private polls run by hundreds of researchers for candidates and party organizations at every level of state and local politics.

Moore reports an exploit of one Gallup executive, Buck Buchanan, who needed an elderly woman on welfare to complete his assigned quota sample, and was directed to a home where a wake was being held around an open coffin. He interviewed the freshly bereaved widow, then helped load the coffin into the hearse. Buchanan was remorseful later about his invasion of privacy, but then he worked for a public poll, not a private one.

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