Advice from Harvard

George McGovern's initial campaign plans did not include Ohio. The Buckeye state, whose primary is May 2, seemed owned by Edmund Muskie. But last week McGovern announced that he would spend a full week in Ohio hoping to reap a rich harvest among the state's 153 convention votes. The advice that he assuredly could came from three seniors at Harvard University.

They are Pat Caddell, John Gorman and Dan Porter, all 21, collectively known as Cambridge Survey Research Inc., McGovern's sole source of polling information for his race to Miami Beach and the youngest--and just possibly the hottest--psephologists in the employ of any candidate in the field. They started working in the campaign in October 1971, on the recommendation of McGovern's Florida campaign manager. Their voter interviewing was a major factor in McGovern's decision to move away from a one-issue Viet Nam stance and to begin working the rich vein of voter discontent over inflation and taxes. They also warned him early that the electorate preferred straight talk to rhetoric this year and was fed up with slick media campaigns. That advice, which happily coincided both with McGovern's personality and his pocketbook, has paid off handsomely so far.

Cambridge Survey was the brainchild of modish Caddell, a bright and articulate student of numbers who started doing election projections for a local TV station while still a high school student in Jacksonville, Fla. In 1970 Caddell and his fellow members of the Class of 1972 worked for 180 an hour and expenses during John Gilligan's Ohio gubernatorial primary campaign. The three worked hard, polled diligently and filed a 2,000-page report of the findings that because of its ponderous volume probably and properly went unread.

Learning from that overkill, Caddell and his partners polished their techniques in several congressional and local campaigns in Massachusetts. By September last year their rooms were spilling over with computer print-outs and voting records that they had gathered. So they moved into a converted apartment just off Harvard Square in Cambridge and officially incorporated their business. In addition to McGovern, the firm's clients now include four senatorial and five congressional candidates--all liberal Democrats and "men with whom we find a large area of agreement," Caddell says.

He attributes the trio's success to a thorough search for responses that older pollsters may miss. "We're not magicians, we're just listening posts," he asserts. Their ability to frame the unasked question may diminish, Caddell thinks, as he and his partners mature. Though they plan to tend their business full time once they graduate, Caddell says, "We'll probably only be good for from five to ten years."

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