Since 1975, Portland pollster Tim Hibbitts has been taking
the pulse of the electorate. Now 47, Hibbitts is calm and
polished, as befits a guy who dabbles in punditry. His smooth
delivery conceals a dry humor; when asked for biographical
information, he cracks in perfect deadpan, "During my teenage
years, I ran a huge marijuana-smuggling ring up and down the
coast."
The real story is that Hibbitts went into polling right
out of Portland State University and has owned his own business
ever since. During election season he provides analysis
for KATU, though he says that amounts to only 1 percent
of his work. He does most of his election-related work for
ballot measure campaigns; the rest of the time he works
for commercial firms, like utilities, that are interested
in public policy. Though early on Hibbitts did some work
on behalf of Democratic candidates, these days he scrupulously
maintains his independence, saying, "We are a nonpartisan
firm."
Last Friday, Hibbitts made the two-block trek from his
downtown office to WW and proceeded to take potshots
at subjects ranging from Oregon's vote-by-mail to the California
invasion to the "clucking media hysteria" over Ralph Nader.
Willamette Week: What were the biggest
surprises for you in this year's election?
Tim Hibbitts: There weren't any huge surprises. I think
what would qualify as a surprise was the phenomenal closeness
of the presidential election. Everybody knew it was going
to be close. But I don't think any of us thought that 105
million people were going to vote nationwide and we were
going to have a 200,000 vote difference, or that we were
going to be in Florida for this amount of time with what
effectively is a tied election.
Normally you're more likely to get surprises when there's
more political turmoil out there. The weird thing about
this election is 95 percent of the turmoil has come after
the election with the presidential race, not before.
Did you do any probing at all into voter fatigue given
the number of ballot measures Oregonians faced?
No, we didn't. That's a good question. We were limited
in the number of things we could ask about in our polling
because we couldn't ask about 20 measures, we could only
ask about 10 or 12 of them at a time. [However] I don't
think voter fatigue causes people not to vote. I think perhaps
they are more likely to say, 'I didn't have time to look
at these as much as I would have liked, I'm skeptical--the
no vote is the safe vote.'
How about a long-term backlash?
We have asked people about that in the past: Are there
too many measures on the ballot? And every time we've asked
it the voters have said, 'Yeah, that's a problem, but I'd
rather have that than initiative reform.' This is still
a state with a pretty strong populist streak in it.
I've heard it said that there are two distinct Oregons,
essentially two voter profiles in this state. Did you see
that raising its head in this election?
Very much so. If anything, it's getting sharper. If you
look at the [Oregon] map of the national presidential results,
it's an astonishing map. Even though Gore won by five or
six thousand votes, Bush carried 28 or 29 counties in this
state. And most of the counties were not close. In essence,
if you take Multnomah County out of the equation, Bush wins
Oregon by 100,000 votes.
Do you have a sense of whether Nader almost cost Gore
Oregon?
Sure he did, but we need to look at the Nader voters with
a little more sophistication and subtlety than some folks.
It was very frustrating before the election to watch, for
three weeks out, the media in essence sounding like a bunch
of parakeets. In essence, their message was 'every Ralph
Nader voter is a potential Al Gore voter.' That's baloney.
The national polls showed that, of the Nader voters, about
a third would not have voted. Their view was very much Nader's
view: that these guys were two peas in a pod. Of the Nader
voters who were left, Gore would have gotten about a two-to-one
break over Bush.
How about if Nader had not been in the race?
Had Nader not been in the race in Oregon, Al Gore still
would have had a hard time nailing Oregon down. Instead
of winning by one-half of one point, he would probably have
won by one and a half to two points. Which means he still
would have been battling in Oregon right up until the end.
I don't see any other states--with the exception of Florida--where
Nader will cost Gore enough votes to cost him the election.
Certainly Nader complicated Gore's life; it wasn't that
he wasn't a factor at all, but what was frustrating from
an analyst's point of view was this clucking media hysteria.
The way they spun it was, 'Well, if you vote for Nader,
then obviously your second choice is Gore.' I personally
spoke with two Nader voters who said if they switched they'd
vote for Bush. And the explanation they gave me was, 'Both
parties are corrupt, and I'd rather have Bush in there because
it's dangerous to have the same corrupt party in there for
too long."
Are the people who've moved to Oregon philosophically
aligned with the people who were already here?
More or less. They're not changing the politics that much--yet.
I'm not saying they never would. But everyone assumes that
everyone that comes to Oregon must have roughly the same
perspective. Well, bullshit: People get drawn here for different
reasons. You can talk to 100 new Oregonians and get 78 different
stories. The net impact is it does not change the political
climate in a huge or major way.
Has vote-by-mail helped one side or the other?
We've had two or three vote-by-mails, and I've seen no
evidence that they tilt dramatically toward the Republicans
or they tilt dramatically toward the Democrats. I'm not
saying it's not impossible that on the margins they work
one way or the other. But no one has given me evidence that
suggests that. What I think it does do is it increases the
turnout a little bit.
A little bit?
Yeah. We had, what, an 80 percent turnout in this election?
I think we would have had 75 percent or more if we had voted
at the ballot box. I think vote-by-mail is OK, but I think
anyone who thinks it's some sort of panacea for turnout
is off base.
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