The Doorbell Ringer

The ring of a doorbell last week at thresholds in Florida and Massachusetts signaled the appearance of a short (5 ft. 5 in.), pudgy man with a disarming grin. "My name is Sam Lubell," he said, "and I'm trying to report the political campaign by talking to the voters." For his pains Reporter Lubell, 44, who has been ringing doorbells since 1948, has been bitten by three dogs, taken for a masher by housewives, a salesman by husbands, and once for a C.I.O. spy. But he has also rung a new bell in political reporting: by combining shoe leather with scholarly insight, he predicted both the Eisenhower victory ("possibly by a landslide") in 1952 and the Democratic recapture of Congress in 1954.

This week, midway through a six-week survey syndicated daily in 83 newspapers, Lubell offered an interim forecast based on his findings among what he calls the key voters--those who supported Harry Truman in 1948 and switched to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. He estimated that "roughly half" of these voters would go for Eisenhower again. "If the proportion holds until Election Day," he said, "it would give the President around 52% of the popular vote, even if all the voters who now say they are 'undecided' were to swing to Adlai Stevenson."

Contradiction. A farther-reaching Lubell finding flies in the face of a reigning opinion among pundits. Apart from the strictly personal popularity of President Eisenhower, he reported, the Republican Party is gaining long-range strength in a "significant reshuffling of party loyalties." In many cases, he found, the economic hostilities of the Depression and the New Deal era, which made the Democrats the "normal majority" party, have been blurred over by prosperity. Moreover, he reported, the "spectacular expansion" of the middle class has given more voters a conscious stake in what they call "the party that's good for business."

Lubell's "impressionistic" technique of predicting how the U.S. will vote and why rests on interviews with only 3,500 to 4,000 families in each campaign. But he believes that his method is better than public-opinion polls. The pollsters try to get a census cross section in taking their samplings--a method that Lubell regards as rigid and superficial. Instead, Lubell goes on the theory that people vote according to group interests, sectional, economic, ethnic, religious. He charts and studies election returns in every U.S. county and most big-city precincts, as far back as the last century, to isolate the important shifting currents in group voting. From these studies, which take far more time than interviewing, Lubell decides what doorbells to ring and what questions to ask.

Imitation. Born in Poland and taken to New York at the age of two, Analyst Lubell did not turn to his specialty until he had already carved out a career as newsman, free-lance magazine writer and Government planner. In World War II he served as right-hand man to Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch, who credited him with "doing all the work" on the survey that formed national policy on rubber production. In 1948 the Saturday Evening Post assigned him to do a post-mortem on the election upset. The result led him to a Guggenheim fellowship that financed a two-year study of election phenomena, produced the first of his two notable books on politics, The Future of American Politics and Revolt of the Moderates (TIME, April 16).

Lubell claims no statistical precision for his technique ("decimal points in a polling percentage are a pretentious farce"), but he believes that he misses no major trends or issues. Other newsmen have begun to pay him the compliment of imitation. Several Scripps-Howard papers, which run his national pre-election survey, are getting his help in mapping local surveys by their own reporters. Almost invariably when he finishes an interview, he is asked: "Who are you going to vote for?" Though the last Who's Who lists him as "Ind. Dem.", Lubell explains that he no longer registers, votes, or even consciously takes sides, lest he be gulled into the professionally fatal error of wishful thinking.

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