Reprinted from The Washington Post, January 15, 1984
The pollsters will tell you that all you have in this business is your
integrity. Lose that and even your own party will cast you aside with last
season's campaign slogans. An admirable idea. But how it can cost.
Ask Bill Hamilton.
When Hamilton was 23, he started his own polling business in Florida, full of pep and vinegar -- and with one client, a young candidate for state treasurer. Three months later, Hamilton was out of a job after telling his client he could never win.
Ten years later, in the mid-'70's, Bill Hamilton's expertise in the South was gaining him heavyweight clients -- and his frankness was still losing them. One such client was a former governor of Georgia, whom Hamilton helped elect. Over drinks at the Chicago Hyatt in 1975, he told the man's aide, Jody Powell, that his boss was not cut out to be president. But another pollster, Pat Caddell, obviously disagreed.
The rest is history.
"There's probably a lot of reasons I didn't get it," says Hamilton today at his Chevy Chase office. "I really didn't think Jimmy Carter could win. But I'm sure it didn't do me any good to tell Jody I wondered whether or not Jimmy was big enough for the job.
"Everything you say, somebody will remember ... It's a relatively small industry with a relatively small set of clients. I really didn't want Jimmy Carter's work anyway. I did not want to work for a candidate that was a long shot."
Today, Hamilton, with his staff of 26 (plus 150 interviewers) at William Hamilton & Staff, is enveloped in his first full-fledged presidential race for a major candidate. He is the pollster and inside adviser for John Glenn - a testament to the fact that personalities count as much as skill.
A large teddy bear of a man, Hamilton has a soft southern sell that is most often described as "low key." After talking with both Caddell and Peter Hart, John Glenn decided on Bill Hamilton.
"He's a low key, matter-of-fact, unflappable person," says Greg Schneiders, Glenn's press secretary. "These are personality traits that appealed to Glenn, himself being like that."
When Hamilton was first hired by the Glenn committee, the best fuel for polling gossip in town was speculation about his price. Pollsters and consultants alike were convinced he got the biggest contract of any of the Democratic pollsters: $65,000 up front and a commitment for another $500,000.
He disputes this, saying, "I have no contract and no commitment."
Hamilton is reluctant to discuss how his findings have influenced the Glenn campaign so far. He will say one thing his polling didn't find: the perception of the much-touted Eisenhower image of John Glenn.
"We didn't discover it," he says. "We found quite the opposite. The words they used to describe Glenn were not sort of older fatherly type words. They were more like tough, intelligent, capable."
Talking himself out of clients is not his only forte.
"I had to stand in the door to a hallway once in order to keep Paul Sarbanes from pulling out when he was 13 points down," says Hamilton. "He was going to pull his papers from the courthouse the first time he ran for the Senate in Maryland in 1976.
"In one sense we are the political conscience of the campaign, the technical conscience. We try not to let them listen to their own discussions and finally decide they can go out and do anything they want to."
Which was not the case with Senator Paul Sarbanes (D-MD). Bill Hamilton got to poll for him a second time.
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