come back to one example how a focus group changed the way a campaign was run, back in 1988 with willy horton's ad. let's go to terranova, i'm going to call on you next, a question for frank newport of the gallup organization. terranova? >> hi. my question is, in an era where informal polling is really popular, how is traditional polling going to keep up? today, you can do the same thing on facebook and twitter. what stems are you going to take to keep poming relevant? >> the polls, these polls that you do on any website are not scientific. >> no, that's the point. people used to say, what about television stations, used to have call in this 900 number and vote yes or not at the end of the news cast, they report what the absoluters are thinking. the facebook polls are the same way. they are not random. they are not representative. so, they really don't give us a hint at all about what we're trying to do, which is represent the broad population. let me just say that again. what we're trying to do in polling is, take a sample and see what everybody would say, if we generalized to it. if you say o

type bads yeah it's sort of having no name prisoner in that revolving door in the willie horton that barack obama is the revolving door there. colmes again he's coming out you're again people are horrified that this man is going to be president i'm states going to go by god obviously that's my first response my god. we're going to by god well it becomes even more apt when it truly is a revolving door. and jeannie diamond and noid blank line and and john kors i will you daily and every single banker you could think of that you might need a gun to drive yourself. nuts and he's been stoking the gun sea air and he's been making a few cents on every gun sale goes into those folks financing his campaign millions do is go on t.v. in america it's like i'm going to bomb dogs are dogs and schools guns in classrooms don't work guns it goes in the family go into the living room you got to get more guns again once again it's the. you know that usually is illegal in like a theater a crowded theater but in our crowded conny it seems to be one sure way out of depression and a crisis liquidity i

this was the issue of crime that the bush administration attacked him on with the willy horton campaign. there's a lot going on, but i have a much better question than mine coming from one of my students, chris mclaughlin. >> kind of piggy backing on that, you kind of answered my question a little bit already, but i look at the question to dukakis and to gingrich as trap questions that are just intended to get a rise out of people. and do you think that those things happen in the general election, there's only a few weeks before the actual question can be asked, before the actual vote, so in the case of gingrich, people got to actually see that he wasn't qualified to be president and moved on from him, but when you have three weeks between a debate and a general election, and people throw out questions like they did to dukakis, do you think that hurts the process and that those thing need to be eliminated, or do you think they should be commonplace? >> oalthough they're two different points in the process, too, which is a key element. >> i think, chris, that one of the things you need t

just want a high profile name to repeat over and over and over again to the american people what willie horton kind of convincing them that voter fraud is a real problem and that these laws are necessary they could just get that one name everything else would fall into place then they'd have a justification for laws that require super tight i.d. and send people to jail for years and years they couldn't voter fraud well luckily for the republicans they found their guy they found their voter fraud let me tell you about the suspect in two thousand and ten this suspect allegedly cast a fraudulent vote in massachusetts in the senate race he bragged to the voters illegally in that state just so he could help the candidate he's recorded fill ted kennedy's vacant senate seat to be eligible to vote the suspect claimed his legal residence was in massachusetts believe it or not this guy actually wrote on the voter registration form that he lived in his son's unfinished basement massachusetts law for a location to be the primary residence of a voter it has to be quote where a person's wells in which is th

the willy horton became a metaphor of other issues in 1988 the dukakis campaign faced. this is the pre-internet age but gives you a sense of how one issue moved the public opinion. >> there are a lot of examples and of course what we're getting into here is this broad view of how campaigns are won and lost, and it has to do sometimes with the single issue spots like that, commercials that happened to hit a responsive chord from the public. you have to give a lot of credit so to speak to the people behind the scenes sitting around a table like this. lot of people decry it say it's bad, we have so much spots to shift public opinion but that's the environment we live in, products and services, we have commercials that move back and forth so that's how we live today is that people respond kind of intuitively, kind of respond emotionally to these kind of ads and the persons themselves, and that can make somebody win or lose a campaign. dukakis, the example you showed there, if your wife was raped, what about the death penalty, and the problem of course pundits said was that

it is not willie horton or anything like that, so we'll see.is obviously cultural, it is obviously age we are talking about here. and it may just be ethnic. we'll see. >> so you're saying that this ad plays to the older voters. typically, chris, who comes out to vote for in an election, is it the youth, which will love this cool image, or is it the older voters? >> the election last time turned on the fact that younger people showed up, they showed up about as often as they do, 1% or more, but they voted overwhelmingly for the president by 2-1. for the president to win re-election based upon those numbers, he has to get the same turnout of young people 17% or 18% of the electorate and they have to vote for him by the same sweeping numbers. that's assuming everything is about the same. the republicans know this, the democrats know this. the president is playing this by getting the kids energized by reconnecting to them, having spent four years dealing with foreign policy, killing bin ladin, saving gm, saving the auto industry, he's trying to con