By Mary Krueger and Joe Magruder
ust prior to the 1996 presidential campaign season, focus groups and polls revealed a cynical and dissatisfied public. Citizens were turned off by the media and politics and felt detached and confused. In New Hampshire, a media partnership was formed to address the problem.
The Telegraph of Nashua, the Associated Press, New Hampshire Public Radio and New Hampshire Public Television called their efforts “Voters’ Voice.”
The partners, most of whom had participated in a similar effort in 1994, began their preparations in the spring of 1995, when a steering committee began meeting regularly. Financial backing from the Citizens Election Project enabled the partnership to hire a coordinator and pay for statewide polling. The partnership also drew on the results of focus groups conducted in New Hampshire by The Harwood Group and paid for by the Citizens Election Project.
The partnership’s purpose was to make voters’ issues and voters themselves the focus of news coverage of the New Hampshire elections. The first order of business was finding out what was on voters’ minds. Accordingly, the partners commissioned a comprehensive poll conducted in mid-June by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. The results underscored the depth of the economic insecurity felt by New Hampshire voters, something much of the rest of the world would not wake up to until Pat Buchanan’s victory in the Republican primary eight months later.
Together with CEP-sponsored focus groups, the poll provided a baseline of voter sentiment and the basis for a “citizens’ agenda” of issues that guided our project through Election Day. The poll and focus groups showed a strong current of voter discontent with politicians and candidates. They showed that people were leery about the state of the country. They distrusted politicians and doubted their ability to solve fiscal and social problems. They also were critical of the media. “I think we, the public, have allowed media too much leverage,” said Eleanora Cropley, a citizens’ forum participant.
PARTNERSHIP STAFF TRAINING
The second early task facing the partners was educating their own reporters and editors about citizen- and issue-based election coverage. The CEP conducted a day-long training session for partnership reporters in July 1995. Among the important lessons was that civic journalism is hard – increasing rather than decreasing the work load. Partnership reporters may be required to stay abreast of campaign nuts and bolts while simultaneously laboring to produce an entirely new dimension of campaign coverage. Moreover, editors and reporters would have to keep in mind that they would be going against the grain of what many of their colleagues were doing every day of the campaign. As one trainer put it, doing a civic journalism project was as much a matter of mind-set as mechanics.
RECRUITING CITIZENS
For the project to succeed, the partners needed to be sure they could make contact with voters who represented, as nearly as possible, the New Hampshire electorate. Reporters could, and would, find some of these voters on their own. But a more systematic approach would lend a greater degree of authenticity and authority to the journalism the partnership produced.
During the field work for its June poll, the Survey Center asked respondents if they would allow a reporter to call them later as part of a follow-up procedure. Those who said yes became the basic pool from which the partnership later drew citizens for interviews and citizen panels. In time, the basic list was exhausted, and the coordinator began selecting telephone numbers at random from the phone book in striving to ensure that a group of voters who were interviewed for stories or who took part in panels was as representative as possible. Despite a determined effort to avoid repetition and overlap, however, some New Hampshire citizens took part in as many as three forums, which detracted from the sought-after randomness.
(One important note about citizen selection: Although it was clear early on that the only real competition in the 1996 primary would be among Republican candidates, no effort was made to choose or favor likely GOP voters. Instead, the goal was to choose citizens who were representative of the entire New Hampshire electorate. The rationale was that the candidates ultimately were running for president, not merely for their party’s nomination.)
CITIZENS MEET THE CANDIDATES
In addition to interviewing and quoting citizens for news coverage, the partners wanted to give them meaningful opportunities to meet with and question the candidates. The goal was to give citizens a greater role in setting the issues agenda, which in the recent past, at least, has been the nearly exclusive preserve of candidates and the media. In planning the citizen-candidate meetings, the partners agreed that they would seek to create an atmosphere that was intimate, low-key and primarily citizen-controlled.
The format settled upon was “citizen forums” – groups of eight to 10 citizens who would sit down for 90 minutes with a single candidate. Attempts were made to balance the groups for age, sex, race, income and political affiliation. A nonjournalist moderator directed the flow of conversation and asked follow-up questions. Citizens were given materials explaining the project and were asked to be themselves and talk about issues of genuine personal interest to them rather than taking cues from the news or the campaign. Journalists covered the meetings as the legitimate news events they were.
Seven of the nine leading
GOP presidential candidates,
including Lamar Alexander (right)
and Pat Buchanan (below),
took part in 90 minute
“Voters’ Voice” forums with citizen.
The first forum was on Oct. 7 in Durham with Sen. Arlen Specter. Seven citizens sat in a circle and questioned Specter about his positions on abortion, crime, tax reform, education and sending troops to Bosnia. After the forum, some participants were interviewed about the format.
“You don’t get the feeling that you’re hearing someone in a news conference just spewing out what they say in every news conference in every city,” said Michelle Morrisey
The coordinator mailed copies of news stories about the event to other campaigns to encourage them to commit their candidates to participating in similar ones. All the major campaigns agreed in principle, but getting commitments for actual dates proved much more difficult. In the end, Bob Dole never committed to a date and never participated. Steve Forbes committed to a date in late January but cancelled several days before.
About a week before the Feb. 20
primary, 13 citizens met in another
forum to discuss the candidates
and the issues.Counting Specter, the seven other leading GOP candidates all took part in forums, including Buchanan, Lamar Alexander and Phil Gramm, a significant success. Questions asked at the forums and the tone of each varied depending on the personalities of the candidates and the citizen participants. It wasn’t easy to predict how a given session would go.
Sometimes, candidates questioned citizens, as when Sen. Richard Lugar asked members of his panel what qualities they wanted most in a president. At the forum attended by Buchanan, the candidate was combative at times as several panelists, all Republicans and independents, argued with him about his strong anti-abortion stance. An official of Buchanan’s state campaign staff later complained that the panel had been stacked and the candidate treated unfairly. (In fact, the panel had been balanced with at least two members identifying themselves to reporters as anti-abortion. Both chose to stay largely out of the abortion discussion, however, while advocates of legal abortions showed no such reticence.)
As the partners gained experience with the forums, they formalized the process of conducting post-forum follow-up interviews with the citizen participants. In general, participants were enthusiastic about the sessions. But their enthusiasm did not necessarily extend to the candidates who participated. Al Milchen, who took part in the Gramm forum, said, “You push the button and get a canned response.” Another participant, Ann Kokinda, said she viewed Gramm as a Washington politician. “I don’t think anybody [in Washington] understands how the average person lives,” she said.
ISSUE OF THE WEEK
To make their issues reports credible, the partners knew they would need apples-to-apples comparisons of the candidates’ positions. Rather than undertake such a comparison themselves, the partners chose to use material provided by Project Vote Smart, a nonpartisan voter information clearinghouse in Oregon. The partners sent to all the candidates a 12-page issues questionnaire developed by Vote Smart for the 1996 presidential race. The responses were used as the basis for “issue of the week” stories that ran, sometimes twice a week, during the last hectic months of the campaign. The general format was to identify an issue (using the June issues poll and the September focus groups) and then examine it through the lives of, and in the voices of, individual New Hampshire voters. For newspapers, the stories were accompanied by boxes summarizing the candidates’ stands on relevant issues based on the Vote Smart questionnaire.
The AP, The Telegraph and New Hampshire Public Radio each reported and wrote some of these stories. Those written for print were adapted for broadcast and vice versa.
CITIZENS TACKLE THE ISSUES
In addition to the citizen forums with individual candidates and the CEP-sponsored Harwood focus groups, the project held three citizen focus groups on campaign issues. The goal was to make these conversations news events in themselves and to give voters an opportunity to speak in greater depth and with more clarity than was possible through polling.
The first session was on balancing the federal budget. At that point in the campaign, the Republican candidates and President Clinton had agreed on the need to balance the budget within seven years. As the partners saw it, this watershed consensus made details of accomplishing this a key issue of the campaign.
To structure the session, the partnership had the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan lobby for a balanced budget, run its “Debtbusters” exercise. After a brief introduction, the 20 citizen participants were armed with facts and figures about the budget and worksheets to help them play the role of congressional negotiators actually doing the job. They were divided into three groups. Each chose a spokesperson to brief the other two groups about his or her group’s work. Each group succeeded in balancing the budget in seven years.
Most of the participants left with a better understanding of the complexity of the task and the tradeoffs required. Some also left frustrated, complaining they had been railroaded by the majority in their small groups. “If I were a congressman, I’d sit there until hell froze over before I’d make some of these cuts,” said participant Mark Sullivan. Added Eric Schain, another participant: “I’m willing to pay more taxes to balance the budget because this is important to me and it’s important to my kids.”
The partnership’s second citizen focus group was held 10 days before the primary to discuss how people decided whom to vote for. The discussion lasted for 90 minutes. Many participants said they disregarded advertising and instead tried to read, watch news programs and listen to the radio. Most said discussing politics with co-workers, friends and family was integral to the process. “I try to ignore the ads because they are making a one-sided point. I listen to the opinions of the people in my communities,” said John Moritz.
In general, the participants said they were still undecided and somewhat disenchanted by the campaign. Stuart Bernstein had this advice for the candidates: “Don’t follow us around. Be one of us. Do some laundry, buy some socks. Get in touch with what [our] life is about.”
The final “Voters’ Voice” event was a focus group on Feb. 15, the Thursday before the primary and the same evening as the nationally televised Republican debate. The group watched the debate and participated in a moderated discussion afterward. Their reactions, mostly unfavorable, were the story. “There was so much mudslinging it was ridiculous,” said Cathy Patterson. Others said they had expected little and weren’t disappointed.
LOOKING BACK
Getting the campaigns to cooperate was the most difficult part of the project. The coordinator and steering committee members seemed always to be waiting for commitments from candidates to attend citizen forums. Buchanan and Forbes declined to respond to the Vote Smart questionnaire. Some other candidates submitted vague narrative responses. Our television partner turned out not to have the resources or program vehicles to film most of the events and, in fact, aired none, which undercut the project’s influence and reach.
Recruiting forum participants after the list from the June poll was exhausted was tedious and time consuming. In particular, women, minorities and young people were difficult to recruit. The partners discussed offering child care, transportation and honoraria to attract people from the lower end of the economic ladder, but the idea was never put into practice. For future projects, recruiting could be made more efficient, if the poll questions were clearer about the requirements for participation.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Citizen participants who provided written evaluations of “Voters’ Voice” were generally positive. All said they would like to see the project continue. Some felt, however, that the partners’ own reporting of “Voters’ Voice” events illustrated the tendency of the media to report in soundbites. “The discourse had a pressured ‘soundbite’ mentality that could have been avoided with a more thoughtful facilitator,” participant Lovering Hayward said of the group that watched the Feb. 15 debate. Another participant, Jeff Dike, put it more colorfully: “I was quoted several times in The Telegraph after the Keyes event. All my zippy lines were there, and my more substantive comments were either mangled or ignored.” Participants felt they benefitted most from the dialogue with other citizens. Some found it comforting to know they were not alone in their cynicism about politics.
The “Voters’ Voice” partners hope to expand their numbers and continue citizen-and issue-based coverage through the 1996 general election and beyond. They have no doubt the project changed their own news organizations and the character and nature of their coverage of the campaign. There are signs that it also influenced nonpartners. One New Hampshire daily newspaper ran its own citizen-based coverage with a similar logo, and two other dailies established citizen panels to use as sounding boards during the campaign. Most “Voters’ Voice” reports received national play on National Public Radio and the AP wire. NPR also broadcast a special on the “Voters’ Voice” candidate forums.
“Voters’ Voice” was only a first step but it was, all in all, a successful one.
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