HIS POLLING SECRET: FORGET PEOPLE
By Grainger David

(FORTUNE Magazine) – CHARLES MCLEAN IS A POLLSTER, BUT he doesn't poll people. People, after all, are expensive to call, and you never know whether you're talking to the right ones, and sometimes they lie to you. That's why McLean, who runs Denver Research Group Inc. in Aspen, takes the pulse of a more reliable, trustworthy group: the media.

Say what? One of the more interesting developments of this political season has been the rise of alternative polling, especially polls that analyze "conversational mass." The basic idea is that by surveying a vast number of news outlets, from networks to newsletters to blogs, it's possible to spot developing political trends before they show up in traditional opinion polls. McLean counts several FORTUNE 500 companies as clients, and similar methods are also being used by divisions of IBM and Accenture to forecast everything from elections to sales trends.

When FORTUNE caught up with McLean, he was watching the evening news--"The only part of my day that has no value whatsoever," he said. He prefers a broader perspective: His system sifts through 8,000 sources from around the world. It uses a combination of computer algorithms and human analysis to track the "momentum" of a particular issue and then examines how the "tone" of the overall coverage is shifting. The sources are individually weighted to account for their political leanings on each issue, or what he calls their "personality."

By the end of October, McLean (a Republican who did some work for the Kerry campaign) was predicting a Kerry victory but had already moved past the election and turned his attention to the Middle East. The DRGI database has been eerily prescient in foreign affairs, projecting that France and Germany would split with the U.S. over Iraq a month before it happened (57%) and that Madrid would suffer a terrorist attack in the run-up to elections (70%). Today McLean is projecting an alarmingly high chance (over 50%) that the U.S. will face another terrorist attack sometime between Nov. 3 and June 30, 2005. That, he added, holds no matter which candidate is in office by then. -- Grainger David