YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Hart

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75
first
2016-09-12
most recent
2016-09-12
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Okay, I mean, one of the ones that I particularly proud of is working for El Agrasso, who was running for governor of Connecticut. And she went on to become the first governor in the United States, female governor, elected on her own right. And how do you get it biased against having a woman governor? And we had a very complicated questionnaire which found out something that was counterintuitive. The people who were the most biased against her were women over the age of fifty, which was her peer group. And you'd say, well, what's going on here? And what we really found out is they weren't biased against her, but they were telling you about their lives. And so their fear was that a woman would be overrun by a male officials, wouldn't be able to handle the job. And what we did, and this is a... spot with David Sawyer, we put a group of”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, exactly. Great story. Fred was marvelous chairman and a great friend. But in any respect, when I was there, Oliver Quayle, who was the major pollster of that time, having left Lou Harris and started his own firm and was Lyndon Johnson's pollsters in 1964, asked me to come and work for him as sort of heir apparent to take over the firm. I spent a year there. I saw it was not the firm that would be the firm of the future. So I went back to Lou for a short period and then opened my own firm in 1971. I was still in my 20s.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yes, I did. I was in charge of sort of overseeing the organization, so I saw it on the ground. I learned a lot about it. I also did a couple of polls that were volunteer polls, but proved to be very helpful and insightful. And then he lost in the fall. and eventually ran for governor in 1970 and won. So that got me into the political field. And then after being a young person, I decided to take off and tour around Europe. And then I decided to come back. And when I came back, I applied for a job at the Democratic National Committee. And my good friend Mark Shields, who I'd met on the Gilligan campaign, said the National Committee and Fred Harris, who was the chairman, hired me, and I learned a lot about national politics, and I was overseeing a lot of...”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, I'll do a quick hopscotch, and that is I worked for Lou basically with a year out to serve in the Army, but from 1964 to the gain of 1968, the Tet Offensive happened. And I said, I cannot sit on the sidelines in nineteen sixty eight. I went to work for a man named John J. Gilligan, who was working for the United States Senate in Ohio against a five-term governor and two-term senator Frank Lausie. And we won a tremendous upset in the primary. So he was the democratic.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I don't think it's plausible. And when I say I don't think it's plausible, it obviously depends upon turnout. If there's an abnormal turnout among people who do not usually vote, then it would say, but everything we've seen in our polls suggests people have very strong attitudes and are not afraid. Not afraid to express.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, the bias in the sample is who's willing to fill out these questionnaires, who cares about it, et cetera, and they're flooding their mailboxes. So there are all those vagaries, but then you have to say, look, when you go telephone, there are also”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, there is some efficacy, but there's also no plus or minus margin of error because a plus or minus margin of error depends upon drawing a sample, and since there is no sample, it's produced and we talk about various things. And so far it looks like there are some very good numbers out there, but we really don't know. I think there's a ways to go.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, I think that's always a challenge, but I think the more important challenge in this is you don't know if you have a sample. You may have a representation of what the United States looks like, but it sort of feels like when you do a blood test, you know that that blood test belongs to that one person. When you're doing online interviewing, you don't really know what that test is full of. So it's got its own shortcomings.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “used to be a special thing when a pollster came to your door today when somebody phoned you you couldn't be bothered so our rates are now into single digits so you wonder are you really replicating the whole nation and we seem to think that we are and everything suggests but the bigger challenge facing the industry is now a lot of people are doing online polling And the challenge for online polling is there is no sample universe because unlike everybody having a telephone, essentially you're working off various lists and various things and they haven't been totally vetted.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “strategy so in any respect so we now do over 40% of all of our interviews buy sell with people who only can be reached by self telephone and that's become very hard and very difficult the challenge facing the telephone interviewing is response rates”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, to be perfectly honest, we then went into this new period of time, which is obviously the cell phone, and we've now gone online. And those are two different bridges off of which we've come. And the first thing in terms of A, in terms of telephone, well, essentially, there are now 40 plus percent of our interviews that are done for NBC and the Wall Street Journal.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Totally different world. And what's so fascinating about today is that we've gone through the iteration where we went from door to door polling and everybody said, well, telephone polling is too unreliable, et cetera. But by the late 70s, everybody was on the telephone because everybody, quote, had a telephone, and you could reach so many more people, do it more quickly, and do it less expensively. And consequently, from the 80s through 2010, everything was done by telephone with a few door-to-door surveys.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, well, it was fascinating, Paul. And what it showed is that all of these things canceled out one another and nobody changed their vote. And if we had waited and gone the long route, we would have found out the same thing.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Exactly right. And at the same time, Khrushchev was kicked out, and the Kremlin, and the third thing that happened is China tested an H-bomb. So you can imagine in the course right in the middle of a presidential fall election, all of those things happen. And Lou said, we have to get out and do a poll right now. And we conducted the fastest poll that had ever been known to mankind. We sent out the interviews and had them all special delivery, not just regular mail. The interviewers rushed around in a day's time, and then they phoned us long distance at $3.50 for three minutes or whatever it was, and we copied down all the answers in seven days later. We had the results.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Sure. I mean, we were racially sensitive. And by the way, I should mention your mother and her influence on your life. And for me, the same kind of thing. So the conversations that you would have. Second thing that is so important to understand is speed. I mean, in those days, a poll that you put out usually took about three to four weeks to be able to produce it from the time in which you had a questionnaire to the time in which you delivered the results. And I remember in the 1964 election, and Lou had put me into the CBS election night coverage by that stage. All of a sudden, there was the scandal in the White House with Walter Jenkins and then Johnson. Right for morals charge.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, there are three things that are important. First of all, computers were in the nascient period, so that was very, very difficult. And we all used slide rules. We didn't have calculators or anything else. But the most important thing is we did all of our interviews door to door. And you can imagine the relationship that you created with your respondent when you're standing two feet away from them with a clipboard and you're doing an interview. It was very personal. It was very real and you got a lot of information and it was a marvelous way to do it.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, it was just kind of unnatural I could look at numbers and make some sort of patterns out of them and understood them. And it always told me that Mickey Mano was going to be a good baseball player.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I should have, but I just did door-to-door. I heard that was a very effective way to go. But then I got out of college and I needed something to do. And I got an introduction to Lou Harris. And I went down for an interview. And at that stage, he had been John F. Kennedy's pollster, and he had just started the Harris poll, which was syndicated with the Washington Post and Newsweek, and he was doing the election night coverage for CBS. And that was the first early projection returns. So he looked at me, interviewed me, and said, you're one of the brightest, most interesting dynamic people I've ever met. And so I started as a coder at $2 an hour. The first part isn't true. The second part is again.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “He had a marvelous wit and a marvelous way, and in our household there were always political people coming through. I remember that Eleanor Roosevelt came to our house at some stage for some event. And it was a literary and political household, so we were very involved.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “A lot of politics in our home. My mother was a Stevenson devotee in Illinois. And she was as involved as anybody in the Stevenson campaign. And he carried Berkeley by a large margin. You'd be surprised to find that out. That shocking me, yes. Yeah, it really was.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Oh, great peace buffan, great Brooklyn Dodgers fan. But she was a marvelous classmate and a very, very dear friend. And I thrilled and delighted with all her success.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “She was exactly like she is today, infectious personality, very interested in everything that's goes around. And there's one marvelous quality about Doris. When Doris is talking to you, there was nobody else in the world. And it is that marvelous connection.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Doris Currens Goodwin was my classmate and as I've always said there was only room for one valedictorian and one person at the bottom I allowed Doris to take the top doors like”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Indeed, it was nineteen fifty eight I was a junior in high school and the Giants arrived and it only took fifty two more years to get the Giants to win their first World Series. So it happened almost immediately.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Well, I grew up in Berkeley, California. My father was an English professor at UC Berkeley, and it was my mother who I think was a major influence in terms of my career because she was always asking questions. And that was her way. She had this marvelous, infectious way of talking to people and getting a lot of information. And I think that was sort of the native start. And there was the other ability, which for everybody in the polling profession and most people in politics. Love of baseball. Knew every statistic for every player, loved it, understood it. So you had numbers and questions, and I went to Colby College in Waterville, Maine came out.”

    2016-09-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 78 - Peter Hart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source