RESULTS OF THE ALLIANCE TO END HUNGER POLL
Friday, October 17, 2003
Speaker: Tom Freedman
Introduction
DR. ROBERT HAVENER
World Food Prize Council of Advisors
President Emeritus, Winrock International
All right. Now, I have the pleasure to present to you Mr. Tom Freedman. Mr. Freedman was a senior advisor to Bill Clinton, and he was chief of staff for strategy of the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996. He is a political consultant in Washington, DC, and a visiting scholar at the Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank that is concerned about preserving our resources for productive use now and in the future.
He and Mr. Jim McLaughlin, a leading Republican pollster, have completed a poll on voter attitudes about the forthcoming election campaign. He has ten minutes to share the results of that poll with you. Please, Tom.
THOMAS FREEDMAN
Visiting Scholar:
Risk, Resource and Environmental Management, Resources for the Future
Thank you, and I will be brief. I just want to signal what I think will be a useful resource to people in this audience. It’s a little odd to be a political consultant in Iowa this time of year, especially when you’re not urging someone to go negative or to write a 30-second ad. But I think we have some very special and useful information, as we’ve talked about today, about trying to build a political will in the political movement.
We have both the polling and some new data that I think will be helpful, and it’s available. I’ll tell you at the end how you can access the full report.
But I want to thank the World Food Prize, the Alliance to End Hunger, Terry Mean, David Beckmann and Bob Forney. The notion was to take political consultants, both Republicans and Democrats, and have them do what they do with political candidates, was to test the various issues and what’s the best way to talk about this issue. And I think we’ve come up with some important findings.
The first poll we did was a national poll, and I’d say there were three crucial results. First, voters do care enormously about this issue. This is a Republican pollster who put this poll in the field. He found that 92.7% of voters said that it was very important to them about how this issue was resolved. It out-polled fighting crime and fighting drugs as an issue to the American voter.
The second important finding was that voters accepted the facts about the situation; 63% of them said they believe that 33 million Americans were food insecure; over 75% believe that six million children a year around the world suffer from malnutrition, which results in death.
And the third finding, which was not what we expected, was that voters were not looking to... The way the issue had been described to them was not compelling. They wanted to just hear about it, and they wanted programs that were described differently. And the major difference was, rather than hearing about food aid as the solution, they wanted to hear how people could become independent and take responsibility for themselves.
So, for example, when we offered a range of different programmatic solutions, such as fighting corruption, building economic growth, food aid, the number one answer that people wanted, the most successful program, was to help farmers overseas grow more food to help themselves. That doesn’t mean the other things weren’t important and weren’t an important piece of it, but it was crucial that this piece be addressed when you talk about the issue.
The more recent poll we did was specifically of Democratic voters here in Iowa and in New Hampshire to see – Should this be on the presidential agenda? And again we found almost an oil well waiting to be tapped. Over 90% of caucus goers here said it was an important issue to them; 48% said they didn’t think it was getting enough attention; and 67% said too little money was being spent on the issue.
So this shows an enormous potential. It’s sitting out there waiting for someone to seize the moral reins of this issue and take the lead as a political matter.
The last piece of work that we’re doing – and it’s ongoing – is to try and find effective models. What are political movements that have actually worked, that the hunger movement could find and model itself after. And we’ve looked at three so far.
The debt relief, the mid-1980s program in Ethiopia where the Ethiopian famine gained so much attention and increased resources, and all the way back to the Marshall Plan. And I’ll just very quickly summarize, because everyone is waiting for lunch and we don’t have an afternoon session. I’ll take some credit for having moved my presentation here and saving you the afternoon.
But the five things that we found are:
First, they all talked about their causes in moral components.
Second, there was an organization or organizations coming together to build that national or international movement.
Third, there was a discreet, political goal that was out there that everyone who was joining the cause could understand.
And finally, it was a movement that had visible people taking lead and moving it forward. It didn’t just come up from the grassroots, and it didn’t just come down; it was a combination of those two things. We’ll be building on this and making it more available, but I wanted to say finally that the data is available to you in its complete form at www.bread.org.
And lastly, I want to take my turn. When I was in the Clinton White House I got to work with Catherine, and we worked on the school lunch program, and I want to congratulate you personally on this.
Thank you very much.
ROBERT HAVENER
Thank you very much for that brief and very interesting and very informative report. This then brings us to the conclusion of this portion of our symposium for the year 2003. I remind you that our laureate lecture will follow immediately following lunch. Immediately following this closing, immediately on the third floor of this hotel. We’ll look forward to seeing you there soon. Thank you very much. Thanks to all who have helped make it such a success.