Patty Reinert, The Examiner
2008-01-23 08:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

WASHINGTON -

Two days after the New Hampshire primary, Andrew Kohut’s e-mail was still popping. His phone was ringing and messages were piling up. Political reporters all over town had read his op-ed in The New York Times, aptly headlined “Getting It Wrong,” and they wanted their own angles on the question of the day: How did Hillary Clinton win the Democratic primary when every poll had Barack Obama with an unbeatable lead going in?

Most other pollsters offered technical explanations: The polling methodology must have been flawed. High voter turnout threw off the pollsters. Voters decided at the last minute to go with Clinton.

But Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, offered another potential reason: race.

Poorer, less-educated white voters — like those who voted for Clinton — refuse to answer surveys more often than wealthier, better-educated whites, he said. And these white voters who refuse to respond to pollsters tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than the group of whites who cooperate with pollsters.

“We have to look at this,” he said. “We can’t ignore it!”

In this day of snap polls, tracking polls, partisan polls and just plain sloppy polls, Andy Kohut stands out as both a master of polling techniques and as someone known for being fair-minded and nonpartisan. He has become the man to see when polling questions arise — the public face of public opinion polling.

Kohut approaches his work with marked intensity, especially during election season, making it appear that he was born a pollster. But taking a break from the whirlwind in his downtown office, he set the record straight.

“I got into polling,” he said, “because of a lack of health insurance.”

“My wife and I were having a baby, and I was a graduate student and we didn’t have health insurance. I had an assistantship that paid very little money and I couldn’t afford to pay for the birth of this child. So I took a part-time job at Gallup.”

So in the mid-’60s, at age 22, the would-be sociologist whose grandfather and father had worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania left graduate school to take a research and clerical job. Paul Perry, the first methodologist at the Gallup Organization and later its president, took him under his wing.

“I was learning from people who really created the business, the pioneers,” Kohut said. “People speculate about the nature of how people think about things, about their behaviors. And when I found out, boy! You could measure it? That was fascinating to me.”

Kohut stayed on long enough to run the place. Years later, he struck out on his own, founding Princeton Survey Research Associates. He made the company into a success and sold it.

In 1993, he became director of the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press, and later took his work to Pew, for which he runs an independent opinion-research group that studies public attitudes on the press, politics and public policy issues, and in the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the views of the world toward America.

“Andy is very good, from experience or intuition or whatever, at understanding what journalists need to be able to tell a story,” said Bruce Stokes, an international economics columnist at National Journal who serves as a consultant to the Pew Global Attitudes Project and wrote a book with Kohut called “America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked.”

“There are times when I get a poll and I think, here’s the data. I’ll just write a story,” Stokes said. “But then I get into it, and I think, no, they didn’t really ask the right question — interesting data, but no story. Andy asks the right questions and he can present the data in a digestible fashion so journalists will say, ‘Oh, I get it. There’s a story, right there.’ ”

But unlike many hard-charging Washingtonians, Kohut manages to keep his life in balance. “Andy’s the kind of guy who goes home to walk his dog at the end of the day,” Stokes said.

Kohut and his wife, Diane Colasanto, a retired methodologist who met Kohut while both were working for Gallup, live in Georgetown near Rose Park, where Kohut can often be found playing pickup tennis. They take annual vacations to St. Barts and enjoy leisurely Italian dinners with friends and family — a son and daughter from his first marriage, a stepson and a 5-year-old grandson.

“He’s an even better cook than a pollster,” Colasanto said.

Kohut, who has written a couple of cookbooks to share his recipes with friends, said cooking is something “that allows me to change my head a great deal.”

“The other thing I like to do is play guitar — acoustic music, folk, blues,” he said. “I am not a very good guitar player. I enjoy it, I’ll say with humility. With lack of humility, I am a good cook.”

Colasanto described election season as “very intense” for her husband. “Not only is there a lot of work to be done with things moving very quickly, but there also is a lot of stress. It’s very public with people on different sides who are very vested in particular results,” she said. “Then, of course, when all is said and done and the election is over, there is a very public accounting of whether you did a good job or not.”

Kohut said he and his colleagues at Pew try to stay above the fray by being nonpartisan. “I was trained at Gallup and I would say I have the ethic of Dr. Gallup. Dr. Gallup never rooted for one side. When we were getting close to calling the election, he rooted for his number.”

John Zogby, a fellow pollster and friendly rival, described Kohut as “very professional, very dignified — arguably the dean among pollsters.”

“He has got a wonderful track record of producing not only reliable results, but doing what pollsters do best — asking penetrating questions that go beyond the numbers,” he said. “He’s a major practitioner of the art, not just the science, of polling.”

But Zogby was quick to point out that although he respects and admires Kohut, he doesn’t always agree with him. The “Getting it Wrong,” op-ed, for example, was wrong, he said.

“I really don’t agree. I respectfully do not,” he said of Kohut’s race explanation for Clinton’s win over Obama in New Hampshire.

“But I read it,” he conceded. “Why? Because Andy Kohut signed his name to it. And he made me think.”

Andrew Kohut’s tips for success

1 Work hard.

2 Be as vigilant about avoiding mistakes as you are about being innovative.

3 Surround yourself with good people to whom you give both responsibility and authority.

4 Put a premium on communicating clearly.

5 Be enthusiastic about what you do without getting carried away with it. Keep it in perspective.

BIO FILE | ANDREW KOHUT

Born: Sept. 2, 1942 Hometown: Rochelle Park, N.J.

Education: A.B. degree from Seton Hall University, 1964; graduate studies in sociology at Rutgers, 1964-66

Family: Wife, Diane Colasanto; three children, Matt, Amy and Nick

Key jobs: President, the Gallup Organization, 1981-89; founder, Princeton Survey Research Associates, 1989; director, Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press, 1993; president, Pew Research Center, 1996-present

Biggest influences: Paul Perry, president of Gallup; Donald Kellerman, vice president, Times Mirror

Favorite books: “A Soldier of the Great War” by Mark Helprin; “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” by Mario Vargas Llosa; “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole. “I read in spurts. I’ll start reading books and get into the rhythm of reading books and then I’ll get too tired and start reading magazines.”

Quote to live by: “I’d rather be lucky than good.”