Charles Franklin conducted his first poll as a high school student in his hometown of Union Springs, Ala., studying the cartoon preferences of second-, fourth- and sixth-graders.
"I did discover that interviewing second-graders is harder than it seems," he says of the long-ago science project.
Franklin has sure come a long way in the polling business.
As the director of the Marquette University Law School Poll, Franklin provided snapshot after snapshot of Wisconsin voters during one of the more contentious political periods in the state's history.
In a divided state, there was at least one thing the political left and right agreed on this year: When trailing in the polls, each side took a shot at Franklin's surveys.
"Clearly, this poll is out of step with everything else that is out there, and clearly with the political reality," Democratic Party chair Mike Tate thundered when the Marquette Poll showed Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett trailing Gov. Scott Walker before the June 5 recall.
"I hate it when a good poll goes horribly bad," wrote Jeff Wagner of WTMJ-AM (620) after the Marquette poll in September showed big leads for President Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney in the presidential contest and U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin over former Gov. Tommy Thompson in the race for U.S. Senate.
Through it all, Franklin remained unflappable, letting the data do the talking.
Now that it's over, Franklin reflects on the tumultuous year as he sits in his office at Marquette's Eckstein Hall, overlooking afternoon rush-hour traffic of the Marquette Interchange. There are three computer screens in the office and not much else. A screen shot taken from the "Colbert Report" and focusing on a result of the Marquette Law School Poll is taped on a wall just outside the front door.
Franklin wears a dark suit and tie with a unique clip, the winding stem of a pocket watch owned by his great grandfather, a Civil War-era doctor. His voice retains a soft Alabama accent.
Franklin, 58, is completing his year as a visiting professor of law and public policy at Marquette. In January, he returns to his academic home, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is a political-science professor. Franklin and his wife, Liane Kosaki, a faculty associate in UW's political science department, are co-authors. They have a 13-year-old daughter, Anna.
"You don't do public polling without knowing it's going to be controversial," Franklin says. "Whoever is behind is unhappy with the result. I . . . went into this knowing there was guaranteed to be at least one side unhappy at any given time. So I think that's just part of the game."
One after another, he ticks off the races the poll got right.
That would be all of them.
"We got the Romney primary right," he says, mixing and matching winning margins with overall percentages. "We said Barrett in the primary by 22, he won by 24. We said 7 for Walker (in the recall), he got 6.8. We said Tommy would get 33, he got 34 (in the primary) and we said Obama by 8 and he got 7. We said Tammy by 4, she got 5."
"I'll take that any day," he says.
It was a very good year for this relentlessly nonpartisan pollster and academic. Franklin says he hasn't voted since 2000 (he wants to maintain strict objectivity, he says) and won't divulge whether he's a Republican, a Democrat or an independent.
"I think he told me he was a raging moderate, at one point," says Mark Blumenthal, who along with Franklin helped found Pollster.com, which was acquired by Huffington Post in 2010.
Blumenthal calls Franklin "a brilliant academic who knows about the study of public opinion and polling as well as anybody in the country. There aren't many people as good at drawing pictures with numbers as Charles."
The son of a career U.S. Navy aviator (Charles Higgs Franklin II) and a florist (Dorothy), Franklin attended Birmingham-Southern College, a small liberal arts school in Alabama. He says he "went to college without being focused" but in the first semester "had the greatest teacher ever," Irvin Penfield, a political scientist.
"Second semester, instead of being pre-med, I signed up for three poli-sci classes. That was all she wrote," he says.
Franklin says Penfield was an early advocate of behavioral social science, focusing on voting behavior and attitudes.
"I was just ready to lap it up and I did," he says.
From there, he went to the University of Michigan, where he received his master's degree and PhD in political science.
"Irvin told me if I didn't go to Michigan, he'd break my knees," Franklin says. "So I went. I said, 'Yes sir,' like I should have."
"Michigan was the home of the behavioral revolution," he says. There, he studied under Angus Campbell, Philip Converse and Warren Miller, three of the four scholars who wrote the now-classic study on voting behavior, "The American Voter."
Franklin adds that at Michigan he was "taught everything I know about survey sampling" by Robert M. Groves, who directed the U.S. Census Bureau during the 2010 census.
Polling has been part of the American political landscape for generations. In this election cycle, the sheer volume of polls became part of the narrative, feeding the near endless debate on cable news networks and talk radio.
Marquette's law school began to poll this year "to help foster discussion of important policy issues," according to the school's dean, Joseph D. Kearney. Funds for the poll came from donations to the Law School Annual Fund. Under Kearney's leadership, the law school has emerged as a place to discuss social, political and legal issues affecting Milwaukee and the region.
"Without doubt," Kearney wrote in his description of the project, "2012 will bring Wisconsin great attention and scrutiny."
Each Marquette poll involved interviews with 700 people that were conducted by professional interviewers. Telephone numbers, including cellphones, were randomly dialed.
The poll delved into policy. In July, people were surveyed on a range of issues that included truth in sentencing (63% agreed it should continue to be the law) and whether Milwaukee's proximity to Chicago was an opportunity or a threat in terms of business and jobs (63% saw it as an opportunity).
The poll also charted political splits. In May, a third of those surveyed said they had stopped talking to someone about politics because they disagreed about the recall of the governor, Walker.
"We have some very engaged and very active partisans on both sides," Franklin says. "Part of that is the growth of polarization in the country with an extra added dose of the fallout of the recalls and the controversy over the last two years. But the point I've tried to make all year is we also have a modest but still not trivial group of people in this state that don't judge politics in only partisan or ideological terms. In part, that is represented by the 7% or so who approve of both Scott Walker and Barack Obama."
In an article for Marquette Magazine, Franklin also noted that there are some issues that have majority support.
"For example," he wrote, "substantial majorities oppose cuts to spending on education or health care, while at the same time large majorities support increased contributions to pensions and health benefits by public employees and a requirement of photo identification to vote."
Kearney and Franklin say they haven't yet had time to discuss the poll's future, although they both say they were pleased with the project.
The weekend before the fall election, Franklin traveled to New York where he worked as part of the election night decision desk at ABC News. Before he left Milwaukee, he joked with a Marquette colleague that he was packing a passport, just in case the law school poll turned out to be a bust.
It wasn't.
"Frankly, the poll did a better job all year than my subjective guesses would have done," Franklin says.
In 2012, the pollsters beat the pundits.
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