The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Voter Profile

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. The Presidential election campaign was only two days old today but already the pattern -- for the opening round, at least -- is already clear. Jimmy Carter, touching all the voter flesh he can around the country, President Ford remaining largely in the White House hoping to attract media coverage by acting presidential. Today while Carter moved through New York and Connecticut, Mr. Ford stayed home and signed a scaled-down version of a day-care center bill he had earlier vetoed. Jimmy Carter has been making his own effort to appear presidential. When he launched his campaign yesterday at FDR`s vacation home at Warm Springs, Georgia, Carter managed to wrap himself not only in Roosevelt`s rhetoric, but John Kennedy`s as well.

JIMMY CARTER: As in those critical years, it`s time to restore the faith of American people in our own government and to get our country on the move again. This is a year for new ideas and for a new generation of leadership, and that`s what we`re going to have, if you`ll help me. We`ve got to have trust of people in government, we`ve got to have our people working together, we`ve got to have a clear vision of what we want to do -- we`ve got to have good .leadership. We need not be afraid; our economic strength, our system of government, the character and freedom of our people are tremendous resources that are waiting to be tapped. But now our country is stagnant; it`s drifting, it`s divided. It`s time for a change.

MacNEIL: Jimmy Carter at Warm Springs. President Ford has decided not to open his campaign formally until next week, and thereafter will make only about one major campaign speech a week. But to make his presence felt, the Ford campaign has bought a half hour of network time tonight to re-run what they consider his best campaigning yet: his acceptance speech at Kansas City:

GERALD FORD: Together out of years of turmoil and tragedy, wars and riots, assassinations and wrongdoing in high places, Americans recaptured the spirit of 1776. We saw again the pioneer vision of our revolutionary founders and our immigrant ancestors. Their vision was of free men and free women enjoying limited government and unlimited opportunity. The mandate I want in 1976 is to make this vision a reality. But it will take the voices and the votes of many more Americans who are not Republicans to make that mandate binding and my mission possible.

MacNEIL: Assuming that we`ll be hearing a good deal of that sort of thing over the next eight weeks, we`re going to turn away from the rhetoric tonight to the voters: what is on their minds, and how are the candidates turning them on -- or off. At this moment Carter is turning on more voters than Ford. The most recent Gallup Poll shows that they have settled back to roughly where the voters put them before the distractions of the two conventions: Carter 52%, Ford 37%, a lead of 15 points. However, three quarters of the voters still think it`s going to be a horse race. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, in the ideal political world, issues are supposed to separate candidates and decide elections. But history has shown us that this is not always -- if ever -- the case. Matters that should be of major concern often get ignored ... or minor things get blown out of proportion. Also, issues, large or small, tend to appear and disappear almost overnight during the heat of election campaigns.

All of these real-life situations will probably occur in the coming Ford- Carter campaign, too. But at this beginning point in the battle, it is possible to lay out some polling data on how the voters feel about a few of the issues that may play at least some part in the election.

One of the most extensive recent polls on issues was done by the Yankelovich, Skelly and White research firm for TIME magazine. Here`s a sampling:

On the economy -- 51% of the voters think it`s more important to create jobs than to curb inflation.

56% want the government to guarantee jobs for every able and willing worker.

The voters split about evenly on whether to trim expensive social programs in order to balance the federal budget, but they still support a federal national health insurance program, which, like federal job programs, will cost a lot of money.

59% oppose more federal regulation of business and a plurality want to end price controls for oil and natural gas.

On other issues -- a slight majority would back a Constitutional amendment to ban the forced busing of school children, and a bit larger majority would oppose such an amendment banning abortion.

The man responsible for digging up these figures is with Robin in New York.

MacNEIL: Daniel Yankelovich is a public opinion analyst whose surveys have been appearing in major national publications for years. Tomorrow, the Public Agenda Foundation, of which he is a co-founder, will release three special campaign reports dealing with voter attitudes on the major issues confronting the nation this year. Now we`ve had a foretaste of some of the findings of that -- what does it all boil down to, in terms of the issues; what do you think the voter is looking for this year?

DANIEL YANKELOVICH: I think the major issues in the campaign are the economy in the sense of inflation and unemployment and the trade-off between them -- the search for economic well-being and freedom from economic insecurity -- and the intangible but all-important issue of moral leadership.

MacNEIL: Those are-the two major issues as you see them. Do the labels "conservative" or "liberal" matter in the way the voters perceive those things?

YANKELOVICH: They matter to some degree, but I think they`re more misleading than helpful because what "conservative" means has changed for voters over the past few years. It used to mean economic conservatism in the sense of being against government spending programs. Now it no longer means that; you find that most people who call themselves conservative are in favor of increased protection for old age and so forth, where what conservative does mean tends to be in the moral domain -- of a moral kind of conservatism as distinct from an economic conservatism. But I think that`s so confusing that we`re better off not trying to pin too much on the labels.

MacNEIL: If you see most of the issues coming under one or two umbrellas, moral leadership and economic prosperity or well-being, what about those emotional social issues like abortion; which has been injected into this campaign?

YANKELOVICH: Abortion is one of those issues that most voters don`t put at the top of their list, but a minority or voters feel very passionately about ... with the result that if there were a real close election then the minor issues of that sort could make a difference because those who believe in them believe in them so strongly that they override all other considerations.

MacNEIL: But the main things are economic well-being and moral leadership.

YANKELOVICH: I would say so.

MacNEIL: Jim?

LEHRER: Peter Hart is president of Peter Hart Research Associates, a Washington-based public opinion analysis firm. On Sunday Mr. Hart released a national survey on the non-voter which had been commissioned by the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a non-partisan group sponsored by the University of Denver. First, Mr. Hart, Mr. Yankelovich says it`s going to revolve around the economy and the question of moral leadership; do you agree?

PETER HART: I think that basically he`s right. We`re talking about the economic issue as being dominant, but it`s important to remember that this will be a year of the domestic issues and I don`t think that we will be as concerned with foreign policy issues.

LEHRER: You agree about the leadership, too, the perception of moral leadership as being an important thing to the voters as well?

HART: Right.

LEHRER: Alright. Is there anything you would add to that?

HART: I think the first thing to really remember about this year is that it`s probably the most volatile political year we`ve had. And in the tendency to look at a campaign as a lifetime, there are only about 60 days left -- two months. But in two months what has happened this year is Jimmy Carter in late February was nowhere; by the end of April he was the Democratic nominee. Gerald Ford went from a sure nominee to a nomination in doubt. In 60 days we went from the situation in July to September, where Carter had a 39-point advantage down to a six-point advantage. So it`s a very volatile year. Voters are yet to really make up their minds.

LEHRER: Any other important elements?

HART: I think one other important element to look at, of course, will be this non-voting element.

LEHRER: Which is the basis of your study and we want to pursue it in a moment. Do you agree with Mr. Yankelovich on the question that political labels -- conservative, liberal -- don`t mean as much as they used to?

HART: I totally agree. I think there`s been a tendency to overdraw these labels and I think there`s been a tendency to suggest that people will be making their choices on the basis of liberal versus conservative; I don`t think that`s going to be an important voting factor this year.

LEHRER: Alright. Robin?

MacNEIL: I`ll come back to the economic issue a little bit more with both of you gentlemen: do you perceive the economic, bread-and-butter issue as a major one this year, Mr. Hart, as well?

HART: Very definitely, Robin.

MacNEIL: Do you see the same sort of ambiguity, or ambivalence, that Mr. Yankelovich does on the questions of whether you should emphasize unemployment or whether you should emphasize inflation; and if so, how do you read that?

HART: In terms of which do you emphasize, I don`t think it`s ever been shown that inflation is a voting issue, from the point of view that the voters really think that there`s going to be a difference between the two candidates and the solution. In terms of jobs I think it tends to be much more of a Democratic issue, and I think it tends to work more in favor of the Democrats.

The overriding part that Mr. Yankelovich mentioned, and I think it`s a good one, is the whole theme of economic justice.

MacNEIL: Yes. And one other thing that occurred to me in going through your figures that Jim did: isn`t there a contradiction, if people want national health insurance by over 60 percent, or twenty-odd percent, which is going to cost a lot, how do-you reconcile that with wanting less government spending?

HART: The people have an assumption that the level of government spending we have is due to inefficiency, due to corruption, due to unfair tax laws, and they assume that if these pro grams are administered responsibly that we`ll get the revenue from them from these various sources. To some degree they are reflecting what they`ve been told by the media and by the candidates.

MacNEIL. I see. So it isn`t against spending, it`s against corrupt spending.

HART: That`s correct. I think it`s very important.

MacNEIL: Which plays to Carter`s issue of cleaning up the government and making it more efficient.

HART: Very much so. That`s also Mr. Ford`s issue; he also has been fighting against Washington. I think that it`s very important to understand that the people want many of these programs but they feel they`re being prevented from getting them because of the noise in the system, because of the inefficient way in which they`ve been pursued.

MacNEIL: Good. Could I quickly ask each of you one thing: who is getting the better bite on the economic issue at the moment, Ford or Carter -- how is it working, Mr. Hart?

HART: I would give the advantage to Mr. Carter, based on the jobs issue. I think it`s working to his advantage.

MacNEIL: Do you agree with that?

YANKELOVICH: Yes. Actually, the different stands on inflation and unemployment are probably the clearest points about the campaign as far as- issues go, that Mr. Ford is perceived as putting inflation ahead of unemployment as a priority -- although he is concerned with both -- and Mr. Carter with putting jobs ahead of inflation although he`s concerned with both; and their supporters agree with those priorities.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Both of you gentlemen have made a point about the need for moral leadership. Let`s take a look at how the voter sees this question according to the Public Agenda report: 61% think there is something morally wrong in the country; a lot of it apparently has to do with trust. In 1964, 76% of the public trusted their government. Today, only 33% do. And a whopping 83% do not trust their national leaders. Confidence is down very sharply for other major institutions as well, of course: the Congress, the Supreme Court, military leaders, business leaders, the news media, and so on. Over two thirds of the voters think the government is wasteful and inefficient, and there is growing concern about pervasive corruption as well. The result is a heightened feeling of isolation from the American political process. In 1960, for instance, one third of the voters felt that way; today, fully two thirds of the voters do. Mr. Yankelovich, can you add some flesh to those bare statistics on this question of leadership?

YANKELOVICH: Yes. I think that the phrase "moral leadership" is so ambiguous that it means all things to all people; but what we find when we dig into it is that fundamentally people are concerned with the violation in American life of six basic moral principles that can be subsumed under this heading of moral leadership. First is the feeling that there`s too much unfairness in American life, as exemplified by our tax structure, by the disproportionate burden of unemployment, and so forth. Second, there is the feeling that there`s too much flaunting of the laws, unrespect for laws and social norms, particularly crime, corruption in government, the feeling that people are getting away with murder in both the literal and figurative sense. Third is what one might call the Jerry Brown principle: the notion that there has been too much emphasis on rights and entitlement and not enough emphasis on responsibility, restraint, self-reliance. Fourth there is a conviction that American life is dominated by too much concern with the selfish wishes of each individual and not enough concern for the common good, either in the community or the country. Fifth is the principle of realism; people want a kind of honesty, sincerity, integrity of the talk -- plain talk, not the cunning, not the manipulation, and particularly not promising one thing and doing another. And sixth is the principle of participation, people feeling -- borne out very much by Mr. Hart`s study -- that they are being cut out from participation in the political life of the country, and they want in. If you take those six principles compositely they give you some sense of what is at issue in this moral leadership question.

LEHRER: Let me ask Mr. Hart: what kind of person do the voters want that can correct these six things .that Mr. Yankelovich just outlined?

HART: I think it`s obviously a very ideal person, and I think it`s well stated by Mr. Yankelovich. I would single out two aspects as being particularly important, and that was the unfairness aspect which Mr. Yankelovich went into -- the idea that people have problems with economic justice and the way that is doled out, and that`s very important; and the other aspect is participation, because what we found in our surveys is a sense -- and this is of voters as well as non-voters -- that people want to belong, and they want a leader who is going to respond to their needs and not respond to the powerful and the rich alone.

MacNEIL: Could I ask how you two gentlemen see that issue -- I know it sort of has to be a crude question -- breaking for the two candidates at the moment; does the moral leadership issue favor Mr. Carteras you see it, Mr. Hart, or Mr. Ford?

HART: I think it`s important to realize that both men are running against the past. Gerald Ford is running against August of 1974 and trying to tell the voter, "Remember how bad it was. Remember .all the difficulties and how far I`ve brought it and how different I am." And I think Mr. Carter is trying to say, "Remember the last five or seven years and how bad it was."

LEHRER: Let me ask Mr. Yankelovich a question. If the voter is so concerned about moral leadership, are the Carter people right when they say that their polls show that the voters do not want to hear any talk about Watergate and Nixon, etcetera?

YANRELOVICH: It`s complicated. People want to close the book on Watergate; 75% of the public said let`s forget about Watergate. At the same time, the single major criticism of Mr. Ford is the pardon of Mr. Nixon. So there is a general desire to close the book on Watergate -- put it behind us -- but at the same time it still is, in many different forms, a live issue. It`s a question of how the candidates talk about it.

MacNEIL: Do you think these six points you mentioned are breaking more for Carter at the moment than for Ford -- how do your surveys show that coming down?

YANKELOVICH: Let me distinguish here between the surveys and personal interpretation or judgment. I think that one of Mr. Carter`s major disadvanta4es is a feeling of discomfort with him. When you ask people why they`re going to vote for Mr. Ford, the main reason they give is because they`re uncomfortable with Mr. Carter, not because of a positive statement about Mr. Ford himself. Now, Mr. Carter has adopted the moral leadership issue as one of his issues; he has articulated some aspects of it, but I think his credibility on it is probably one of the cardinal question marks in the campaign to be settled by the debates and the campaign, and the outcome of the election will probably depend on the judgment that people make on that point.

MacNEIL: Very good. The third issue which could be crucial in this year -- one we`ve mentioned -- is an American statistic which grows more astonishing with each election. For the first time in 50 years, more eligible voters might stay home than actually voted. A majority of American voters -- more than 70 million -- might deliberately abstain this year. in 1972 the United States ranked twenty-second out of 24 democratic countries in voter turnout, just behind India, which is no longer a democracy, just above Botswana. By November second, we could be last. Peter Hart Associates have just completed a survey to try and explain this extraordinary turn- off, and here are some of the findings: The main reason is that non-voters, 66 percent of them, say candidates can`t be trusted to practice what they preach. 55% believe it makes no difference who gets elected because things always turn out wrong anyway. Nearly two thirds of the voters think the government will usually, if not always, do the wrong thing. And 63 percent think that a few big, special interests run the federal government so political leaders don`t count for much anyway.

Let`s how look more closely at that sweeping indictment of the political system by roughly half the people who are supposed to be its chief nourishment. Jim?

LEHRER: Yes. Mr. Hart, is it possible to give us a rough profile of who these non-voters are?

HART: The non-voters that we interviewed, which was a national cross- section, basically are younger. Almost half -- 46 percent -- are under the age of 35; they tend to be less well educated, they tend to live in urban areas, and they are more heavily of minority races.

LEHRER: Are they people who have never participated, in elections, or are they people who have at one time voted regularly and are now turned off for any one of these number of reasons that Robin-just cited from your survey?

HART: We basically have two typee of people that are nonvoters: one is the dropout, those people who have participated in the past, and we estimate that there are about ten million of those people; secondly there is a group that has never entered the voting stream -- these are people in the "baby boom" generation who are between, let`s say, the ages of 25 and 34, and should enter the voting process this year, by all statistical measurements in the past. And what we find is that among these people they just don`t want to come in, and we fear that this group may become the lost generation of voters.

LEHRER: If these people remain turned off between now and election time in November who stands to suffer the most, Mr. Ford or Mr. Carter?

HART: Well, I don`t know that we can answer it that easily; and, of course, there`s a ways to go and we can hope that the election process, the debates, the fact that men in the lowest voting region, the South, might have some historical pride there.-- we can hope that this will improve. But the loser would have to be the Democratic party in terms of their registration desires; 45 percent are Democrats, 15 percent say they`re Republicans.

LEHRER: Of the non-voters of the people that you interviewed. Do you think it is possible to turn them on?

HART: We certainly hope so; we don`t have the answers. They are looking for somebody to believe in; historically, usually when a race is close or if the situation is that there are new voters coming into the stream -- it should happen this year. If they don`t, they may never come in.

LEHRER: How important do you think the ability or the inability to turn on the non-voter could be in terms of the final outcome of this election?

HART: Obviously, the outcome is going to be determined by who votes; and if these people don`t come in, then it becomes important. And one further thing is, we have to really talk about what it does to a democracy. If less than a majority of the American people go to the polls, we`re really talking about special interest voting, where certain small subgroups start to control what is happening -- and that`s where we`re headed.

LEHRER: That is truly the most incredible thing to come out of your study, as Robin said at the very top, that if the trend continues, that less than a majority of the voters of the United States will actually elect the next President no matter what his name turns out to be.

HART: And going a step further, that we may be talking about only 30 percent of the American people actually casting the ballot for the person who is the next President, and that makes it awfully difficult to govern, when 70 percent didn`t vote for you either by not going to the polls or voting for your opponent.

LEHRER: That is staggering. Mr. Hart, thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Mr. Yankelovich, do you see things as starkly as that?

YANKELOVICH: I think that there`s some possible basis for being a little bit more optimistic. People have been very concerned about the trend line - - voting participation going down -- but one of the reasons that it went down last time was because of the extension of the voting age to 18; and the younger you are, the less likely you are to vote. Now, we`re not-going to have that this time, so there might be a flattening out there. And also, I think that we have detected a very marked turnabout in the mood of the country, that there are some ways in which this bicentennial year, the pickup in the economy, and the election itself is proving to be a somewhat healing experience. My feeling is, first, that it`s too early to tell what the turnout is going to be, too early to say that the trend line is going- :to continue in the direction it has -- my guess would be that it will not go down that dramatically.

MacNEIL: Mr. Hart, how big a difference are we talking about in percentage turnout from `72 to what you project might be the case this year?

HART: We had a 55 percent turnout in 1972, and we may be looking at about a 52, 50 percent turnout; we`re not sure, either, but obviously the trend line is down, and you look at the difference between 1972 and the turnout in 1974, which continued down, and we also did not find in the primaries -- despite all of the interest -- that there was any appreciable increase in turnout.

MacNEIL: So whether we drop below a majority or not of the eligible voters this year, it`s something to be concerned about in a democracy -- that the system is turning off so many potential voters. Can I just ask, in conclusion: according to your survey, Mr. Yankelovich, 75 percent of the voters still think this is going to be a close race, despite the polls showing Ford 15 points, 13 points behind. Do you believe it`s still going to be a close race -- a horse race?

YANKELOVICH: It`s certainly going to be a horse race.

MacNEIL: Can you tell me that briefly?

YANKELOVICH: Yes. More than a majority of the public have not made up their minds yet, so that the election is going to be decided in the campaign; it is not set, it is wide open. It might be tight, but it might also be a very big difference -- it hasn`t been settled.

MacNEIL: How do you see it, Mr. Hart?

HART: Basically, I think it`s important to realize that neither candidate is that well known by the American people. For the first time in probably a quarter of a century we have two Presidential candidates who have really come to the public`s knowledge in such a short period of time, and I don`t think the voters have gone through their cognitive process of-really making a decision.

MacNEIL: Thank you very much. That may be the most encouraging news Mr. Ford has heard in a long time. Thank you very much in Washington. Jim and I will be back tomorrow night; I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.