By Richard Morin

Pollster John Zogby had a problem: Too many political conservatives and not enough lefties were signing up to participate in his online surveys of public opinion.

Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project also had a problem: He didn’t know what Americans really thought about legalizing the five-leafed devil weed.

But both problems went up in smoke recently when Zogby’s polling firm approached Kampia’s Marijuana Policy Project with a novel proposition: Help us recruit smokers and their pals to participate in our cyber-surveys, and we’ll let you add a few dope questions to our national polls.
Kampia jumped at the chance for free market research. And suddenly, Zogby International, a high-profile polling firm that has worked for some of the biggest names in the media, politics and corporate America, became a player in the pot lobby’s ongoing war on the war on drugs.

John Zogby, the president and founder of the polling firm, downplays the arrangement. ” ‘Relationship’ may be too strong a word,” Zogby says. “We have reached out to all sorts of groups to increase our e-mail channel: conservatives, liberals, libertarians, even normal-type people in both senses of the word,” a reference to NORML, the country’s best-known group seeking to change drug laws.
Word of the deal instantly sent pot opponents eight miles high.

“The insidious inroads that the small but heavily financed drug culture continues to make into the fabric of society is truly frightening,” said Charles Perkins, president of Drug Watch International, in a prepared statement. “It is time for the media to expose these lobbyists, just as they would expose pedophiles who try to influence child abuse laws and enforcement.”

Even some of his professional colleagues wonder what Zogby had been smoking when he signed on the Marijuana Policy Project to recruit poll respondents. “You wonder if they’ll remember the question long enough” to answer it, chuckles Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Meanwhile, officials at the marijuana group couldn’t be more pleased. In a “Dear Friend” letter sent to its online mailing list, executive director Kampia explained details of the arrangement, which were confirmed by Zogby officials:

“You now have a chance to . . . make your opinions count, and help the Marijuana Policy Project get professional polling done for free! . . . MPP is teaming up with one of the nation’s most accurate and prestigious polling organizations, Zogby International. ” Kampia went on to note that Zogby is developing a panel of thousands of individuals who agree to participate in Zogby polls. Participants will be e-mailed two surveys a month, “which will take a few minutes each to complete,” Kampia wrote. Then he urged pot proponents to register for the panel online.

“For every 500 registrants we supply, Zogby will place a marijuana polling question for MPP in one of its nationwide polls — both online and via traditional telephone survey methods. Each question would normally cost MPP $1,000 or more. With more than 12,000 people now subscribed to this MPPupdates e-mail list, we have the opportunity to get [thousands of dollars' worth] worth of free survey research — research that could greatly benefit our efforts to end the war on marijuana users.”
Zogby says the marijuana group does not have carte blanche to ask anything it wants on his firm’s polls.

“They submit ideas. But they have to pass our smell test: The questions have to be balanced, they can’t be loaded,” he says. “This is a legitimate public issue.”

He says his firm struck the deal after “we became concerned that we were getting a lot of conservatives” volunteering to participate in online surveys. “Our e-poll group is very young and very aggressive.” And very successful. Already, more than 1,000 people solicited by MPP have signed up to participate in the Zogby Interactive Panel, and the firm already has asked “a few” questions on marijuana issues, he says. Zogby isn’t concerned that the panel will somehow be flooded by marijuana participants. “We have more than 100,000 participants now,” Zogby says. “There’s just not enough to skew things.”

Besides, Zogby would make the same offer to an anti-marijuana group, if they approached him. “If indeed an anti-marijuana group came to us, great, we would welcome them. There would be some groups we would refuse, but if they are in the legitimate marketplace of ideas, that’s fine.”

Some pollsters question Zogby’s recruiting methods. A ferocious debate currently rages in the polling community about the accuracy and reliability of Internet surveys, virtually all of which are based on Internet users who volunteer to participate rather than people selected at random.

Adding to the problem is the fact that Internet users tend to be disproportionately male, white, young and better educated than the rest of the population. Internet pollsters attempt to correct for the difference by statistically adjusting their samples to contain the right proportion of women, older people and those with less education.

But these corrective measures aren’t enough, critics charge.

“I could run up and down K Street and select a lot of people and collect their opinions and statistically manipulate that sample to look like the United States in terms of race, sex, income and education,” says the Pew Center’s Kohut, former president of the Gallup Organization. “But in the end, it would still be a sample of K Street and the people would still reflect a different set of views from the country as a whole. It doesn’t work.”

But others aren’t so sure — at least not yet. “I don’t think we should shut the door on anything, nor embrace it out of hand,” says Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College in New York.

Zogby International is now among the most visible private survey companies in the country. Its client list includes congressional candidates from both parties as well as Microsoft and Cisco Systems, the U.S. Census Bureau, Chrysler Corp., State Farm Insurance, USA Today, the New York Post, Gannett News Service, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Fox Television Network. Is he worried that some of his corporate clients might be spooked by his association with a drug group?

“Not particularly,” Zogby says. “We’re liked by a broad spectrum and reviled by a broad spectrum. So I think we must be doing exactly what we should be doing.”

Author: Richard Morin
Source: Northwesr Center for Health & Safety