(MONEY Magazine) – Five days into the Senate hearings on the Bork nomination last September, the Washington Post/ABC News Poll picked up a blip -- a ''slight plurality of the public'' turning against confirmation. In a front-page story, Post reporter Edward Walsh concluded that ''undecided voters are joining the opposition to Bork.'' What's that again? Undecided voters? Since when do we vote for a Supreme Court Justice? A Justice is nominated by the President, says the Constitution, confirmed by the Senate, then elevated to the Supreme Court, not elected. But the dirty little secret -- known to every senator -- is, we did vote on Judge Robert Bork. We did so through the loop that is tightly closing between television and public opinion polls to form -- vox populi ex machina -- our newest, all-purpose, universal, substitute voting machine. Here's how the vox pop machine works: Whoever appears often enough on TV news eventually reaches many more people than the mere 80 million or so who turn out for a national election. Inside this inchoate viewing public, opinions begin to jell about these people -- never mind whether it's Ronald Reagan or Ollie North, Gary Hart or Judge Bork -- based on the events shown on TV. These opinions are sampled frequently -- in fact, polled overnight by the networks themselves. Then, in a final feedback to complete the loop, they are played back to the audience at the top of the evening news. So now many issues -- including thumbs up/thumbs down on a Supreme Court nominee -- are resolved by this loose surrogate for the electoral franchise without any of us ever having to enter a polling booth, close the curtain and pull some grimy lever. Polling, of course, long ago outgrew the polling booth. Every year, some 140 survey research firms gather $2 billion of data, sampling on any subject, for any sponsor, as far as phone lines will reach. Regularly, and for large profit, we are asked to reveal our purchases, our life styles, our sexual behaviors, our ills, our faiths, our bodies, ourselves. The pressure to poll has become an appetite verging on national bulimia. You are one of 245 million Americans whose opinions are constantly being skimmed off in samples as small as 500 and distilled down to percentiles that delimit the choices you face in almost every aspect of your life. Polls preselect the products you can buy, the names under which you find them, the politicians you are allowed to vote for, the issues upon which they stand, the peers who would judge you in a jury box (though not yet their verdict), shows that you can watch on television, and even the kinds of advertising and articles that appear in magazines. Polling, says Richard Wirthlin, sometimes described as ''pollster general'' of the United States and President Reagan's in-house sampler, ''is the purest form of democracy, a much better cross section of the public than those who vote.'' Why? Voters, it seems, are ''older, better educated, tend to be wealthier'' than most people. What could be more democratic than eliminating the opinions of those elitists who can afford to vote? And if Wirthlin's polls invariably show a comparatively favorable rating for the President -- sometimes 10% higher than the CBS/New York Times poll -- that is only because ''our undecideds are lower. We don't like to press too hard, but we do give a respondent the chance to shade his answer.'' (During the Reagan- Gorbachev summit, he even ran focus groups on the Soviet leader's appearances on TV. The response at first was highly favorable -- until Gorbachev happened to mention Lenin, at which point his rating sank to zero because ''it put everything back in perspective that he's a Communist,'' Wirthlin says.) And despite everybody's folk belief that no poll ever calls them, the national interview hit rate is amazingly high. One survey firm, Walker Research Inc. of Indianapolis, recently concluded that it and other pollsters call about a third of all U.S. adults in a year's time. Of these, 24% are polled once, 28% twice, 16% three times and an astonishing 32% four times or more. Polling is only the visible part. The poll results are then put through computers programmed with every kind of data base -- mostly from the census, but also zip codes, subscription lists, tax rolls, credit checks, land-use maps and so forth. The mix produces statistical predictions about people's behavior -- conclusions of the people-counting science called demography. You are only a number to demographers, and they can crunch your number over and over to describe the future of the society. With polling and demographic research so ubiquitous -- and, via the vox pop machine, so influential -- we might well ask ourselves, in some next nationwide poll, questions like these: -- Do polls really reflect underlying reality? (Yes or no) -- What are the dangers of abuse among pollsters? (Multiple response) -- How should you interpret the polls in your life? (Solicit single response) And above all, -- Is our Great Democracy about to become the Great Demography? (Open-ended question) ''Poll proliferation'' is what Peter Hart calls it. ''Fifteen years ago, there were only a few relatively reliable, relatively calm polls,'' says Hart, a Democratic pollster. A.C. Nielsen was dominant then, gently asking after our viewing habits. Venerables Elmo Roper and George Gallup and upstart Lou Harris were the big names. ''Now,'' complains Hart, ''every Third World country has a poll of its own.''

So insistent is polling in its demand to be heard that it has even fathered, pace Gannett chairman Allen Neuharth, the country's first all-poll newspaper, USA Today, where no finding is too inconsequential, no sample too small to reach print. The paper's front-page headlines, much of its reporting and all those USA ''Snapshots'' are demography in a hyped, headlong pursuit of who ''we'' are. They tell us, for example, that the stork brings us 4.4 babies a second, that our average annual income is $12,304, but that we owe about $2,380 a person, spend $9.24 to stock an Easter basket and $49 for a cleaning lady, to avoid cleaning the oven -- for 48% of Americans, Our Most Dreaded Chore. ''They tell you where you fit in, what part of society you are, what you are going to do,'' says Richard Curtis, head of Graphics, perhaps the paper's most influential department, where bar graphs are turned into rainbows and every upward trend into a pie chart in the sky. ''This department helps set the news agenda,'' says Lewis. ''Graphics produces news.''

But Gannett is only scratching the four-color surface of what polling can do. Take, for instance, what Bill Williams and Ed Binkowski came up with at Strategic Comaps Inc., a New York City-based financial firm, while developing what they call ''demographic bond analysis.'' You maybe thought Standard & Poor's handled all that, but it turns out that 80% of municipalities are too tiny for S&P to rate, even though they're collectively worth a trillion dollars. Williams and Binkowski devised a computer program that can run a credit check on entire small towns and rate their borrowing capacity. ''What makes it a winner,'' smiles Williams, seeing even wider markets, ''is that we can now tell the difference between a late payer and a nonpayer'' -- or at least say where each is likely to live. ''We can also locate the credit avoiders,'' adds Binkowski, ''the thrifty folk who always pay their bills on time.'' We will spot these sharks for you, Williams and Binkowski offer, before they prepay their high-interest mortgages and start a lower-the-rate run on your bank. Or take the study entitled ''Index of Susceptibility to Civil Disorder'' that demographer Jonathan Robbin did at the Office of Economic Opportunity just as the smoke rose over burning Detroit in 1967. ''It 97% accurately predicted which cities would burn,'' recalls Robbin. ''It was not based on discontent or racial tension, just on which cities were old, which neighborhoods ought to be burned down. It didn't all happen in 1967, but when Martin Luther King Jr. got killed the next summer, that filled in the gaps.'' Today Robbin uses a similar approach to sort the country's 43,000 zip codes into 40 demographic clusters -- 40 ''neighborhoods,'' in effect -- each with a catchy name. He has made a fortune with his company, Claritas of Alexandria, Va., telling business giants from Coca-Cola to GM the buying habits of clusters like Blue Blood Estates (Jaguar, Treasury notes, Cheers), the New Melting Pot (Mitsubishi, CDs, Hill Street Blues) and Norma Rae-Ville (Bonneville, personal loan, A-Team). Remember that first TV debate among the Democratic candidates on Firing Line last spring? Chris Wheeler of Wheeler Associates in Seattle asked 85 Iowans (all likely Democratic-caucus attenders) to watch the broadcast and register their reactions by twisting a hand-held dial from 4 for Neutral up toward 7 for Hurrah! or down toward 1 for Boo! Every three seconds, their cumes were racked up and converted into a constantly moving red index line superimposed over the video image. Keep an eye on that moving line, that mad, red glowworm. Watch it disintegrate whenever Bruce Babbitt opens his mouth. See it arch up high for Duke Dukakis but hunch a bit higher for Dick Gephardt, tie itself into knots over Joe Biden (poor fella), crawl both ways for Jesse Jackson, and just plain wilt for Al Gore. Then watch it steadily soar for Paul Simon, as if climbing a cliff. Only once does it falter, when Simon mentions his silly bow tie. So right on track that you can see these Iowans following each step of Simon's logic. But at the same time, so utterly reactive and nonverbal. Because all you really see is glow, little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer. A similar trick -- asking people to press ''like'' and ''dislike'' buttons -- helped Wirthlin discover that Fritz Mondale was barking up the wrong tree during the 1984 debates when he accused Reagan of being too old to be President. The charge made people's skin crawl -- against Mondale! A big relief, because Wirthlin had long based his political strategy on Reagan's personality and ideals. ''I had a simple idea for 1980,'' Wirthlin says. ''I knew I couldn't put it together on partisanship -- the Democrats had 52%. I couldn't put it together on constituency, but I could put it together on values: family, patriotism. Those struck some very harmonious chords.'' This is where Wirthlin, the social scientist, emerges and draws a chart entitled ''Values in Strategy Assessment.'' Out of the Laffer Curve on a napkin came Reagonomics. Now get ready for Reagographics. At the top left-hand side of a yellow pad, Wirthlin writes: Candidate/Product -- and at the bottom, same side -- Person -- ''Now how do we get there?'' he begins scribbling. ''What does a candidate or a product have? Attributes.'' Candidate/Product Attributes ''And what comes from those attributes?'' Consequences ''What do you get, what do we understand from consequences?'' VALUES ''And values are what people can relate to, what connects everything up.'' Person VALUES He draws more arrows to tie together the entire chart, showing how Reagographics gets you from Candidate/Product to Person and back again, especially around that binding loop of television to polls to television that is the new voting machine. ''It's a marketing strategy, yes,'' he says, and Wirthlin's suburban Washington, D.C. company, like most big survey firms, does more marketing polls (usually for large corporations) than political polls. Still, Wirthlin's pride is his political polling, especially his accurate call of Reagan's '80 and '84 landslides: ''The best single indicator of how well your system is working.'' But Wirthlin does draw a distinction between this kind of polling and his commercial work: ''This is important. The values that apply to a candidate or a soft drink'' -- he circles the Candidate/Product heading -- ''may not apply to an American car.'' The trouble is, say the more thoughtful pollsters, everybody wants a number. ''Numbers seem to be truer than words,'' says Daniel Yankelovich. ''There is a patina of validity to a number that may not really have it.'' This fascination with numbers, any number, began around the time that microcomputers made it possible for any shnook to play with the data. The result ''is a promiscuity of polling, a mindlessness,'' says Yankelovich. ''Nobody cares what goes in, so long as what comes out is a number.'' Bill Williams, who has worked with both AT&T and Louis Harris, agrees. ''In corporate life everywhere, executives like to hide behind data. That way, if anything goes wrong, they can always point to the number and say, 'What else could I do?' '' But all sorts of ignorance, error and even fraud can corrupt a number. ''Polling is one of those serious tools that can be misused as a gimmick,'' continues Yankelovich. ''It's like sex therapy: a very serious subject, but it can be exploited.'' And among the most exploitative gimmicks lately have been those 900 numbers that TV pitchmen ask you to dial so that you can offer your 50 cents opinion on the likes of Ollie North. The distortion of these surveys, pollsters like to say, is in the denominator. Visualize a polling result as a fraction of an entire population. The numerator is how many people answer a given question a particular way. It goes over the denominator, which is the total number who answered the question. The result is supposed to show the fraction of Americans who would agree. With present methodologies, the denominator can be kept fairly small: 1,500 people interviewed by telephone is the usual national sample. As few as 500 people called overnight can produce a fraction that is accurate to within six percentage points, if -- and it is a big if -- the respondents are chosen in a scientifically random fashion and carefully screened by interviewers for later demographic weighting. Exactly the opposite happens when a viewer rushes to his phone at some TV ^ host's prompting and dials in to a 900-number poll. Rather than being chosen scientifically, he is volunteering his opinion out of any number of possible motives, from impulse to bias, and hence the self-selected denominator will not accurately reflect the population as a whole. ''Those numbers are not projectable,'' says Professor Gerald Glasser, a New York University statistician, ''so why the hell do it? It serves no purpose and can provide a disservice.'' The most blatant recent case of such a self-selecting -- and self- aggrandizing -- poll is Shere Hite's book, Women and Love. Hite bases her dismal appraisal of relations between the sexes on a slim 4,500 responses she received after tossing 100,000 copies of a questionnaire over the transoms of women's organizations and other such groups. This self-selected sample produced some provocative conclusions -- such as that 70% of women married five years or more are having affairs. But, asks Professor Donald R. Kinder, a public opinion specialist at the University of Michigan: ''Why did so few people respond? She has no way of knowing what 95% of the population really thinks.'' But self-selecting samples are only one way to distort the denominator, says Gale Metzger, former head of the Research Quality Council of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). The same thing can happen in good research. Take the recent debate over the odds of single women over 40 ever finding a husband. Researchers at Harvard and Yale put their chances at one in 100, a statistic that the media whooped up into a furor. Then the Bureau of Census countered that women over 40 actually have a one-in-five chance of marrying -- 20 times more likely than the Harvard-Yale figure. The difference? The Harvard-Yale study assumed that college-educated women would follow the same pattern of marrying as past generations of high school-educated women, only they would start later. But the bureau assumed that today's college- educated women would establish a new pattern of postponed marriages. ''So if you are unmarried but still want to marry,'' says Thomas Exter, an editor of American Demographics, ''your chances are probably much closer to the Census Bureau's figures.'' The Census Bureau has problems of its own with that most formidable of denominators: the total population of the United States. The current estimate is 245 million. But as Barbara Bailar, the bureau's former chief statistician, admits, ''We are out there counting, but we miss people.'' This is the infamous undercount of minority urban populations that affects everything from how voter districts are drawn to federal compensation for public aid, schools and the like. The bureau has statistical strategies for on-course correction during the 1990 census. But whether they'll be used depends on a political battle, since correcting the undercount is seen as favoring the Democrats. Raw or corrected, the 1990 figures will still be taken as gospel by private survey companies and used, for instance, to target beer sales to the Single City Blues, as Claritas calls them. ''What astounds me,'' Bailar shakes her head, ''is that people buy this stuff. Any number is better than no number.'' In 1980 the census takers asked a question about the handicapped. ''We wanted to take the question off our reports because it wasn't answered well. But the handicapped said, 'Don't take it off. It's the only number we've got.' People aren't looking beyond the numbers to see what's behind them, and that is mad.''

A MADNESS FOR NUMBERS The madness shows forth, almost grinningly, whenever a number is suddenly probed, as happened after A.C. Nielsen's TV ratings were challenged by an upstart, AGB Television Research Inc. Nielsen, with its seasonal sweeps of viewer habits, has long controlled the television advertising dollar. It is almost as if Confucius say one Nielsen percentage point worth 859,000 households, now valued at $3 million in prime-time ad rates. But the old Nielsen numbers were based on weekly diaries, usually kept from memory by Mom, of a family's viewing. AGB, on the other hand, mounted the first ''people meters,'' on which each family member reported in electronically by pushing a button when he sat down before the TV. Nielsen rose to the threat by installing people meters in 2,000 of its homes, initially producing chaos. If Mom used to write in The Cosby Show for the whole family just because it was her favorite, the people meter found her out. Cosby viewership was down 16% from last year under the new system, and network viewing in general was off 10% -- a $40 million to $50 million loss in ad revenue. Into the meter mysteries now comes another contending pollster, R.D. Percy, son of Senator Charles Percy, with a radically new approach. Percy's company stayed ''very secretive,'' says vice president Paul Donato, while wiring 1,200 households in and around New York City for ''passive people metering.'' Its vox box, an infernal machine that looks like an electric pencil sharpener with no hole, silently scans the room with infrared sensors every two minutes, searching out warm bodies to match against the button-pushing count. Nielsen has also been experimenting with infrared, but its engineers say a large dog can perturb the count. No problem, counters Donato: Percy's vox box spots the family dog as a low-profile character, eliminates any standing lamp in the room and zeroes in on real, live viewers. Percy is able to report confidentially whenever somebody slips into the room or, worse, sneaks out during the commercial.

CHAOS ON THE PROWL Such is the chaos loosed in the denominator when competing pollsters plunge right off the visible spectrum, searching for a better number. But there is an added statistical aberrancy, brought on by the active people meters. ''Late night is suddenly hot again,'' shrugs Gale Metzger. ''But is this only people falling asleep in front of their sets?'' How is the vox box to know if that slumping person who turned on Johnny Carson at 11:36 p.m. is still awake in the shimmering infrared vroomlight? But if there are problems with the denominator, consider those of the numerator -- the part of the fraction that shows how many people gave a certain answer. ''There are cases where people feel so strongly that it doesn't make any difference how you word the question,'' says political editor Adam Clymer, who heads the Times half of the CBS/New York Times poll. ''On boycotting the Moscow Olympics in 1980, for instance, 2 to 1 in favor, no matter what the wording. But that is not the case when you ask about abortion.'' There, a subtle change in wording can cause a fifth of the respondents to change sides (see the illustration on page 146). Abortion is simply one of those issues, says Yankelovich, that bring ''a volatile, messy response, instead of one that is stated and clear. You can't get at it with a single question,'' he says, and cites journalism as a parallel. ''Suppose you were given a complex story and told you had to write it all in exactly one line. You couldn't do it.'' Apt enough, since lately it is journalists like Clymer who run the national polls. ''Since 1968,'' says CBS News survey director Kathleen Frankovic, ''we control our own operation as well as, if not better than, any outsider who might have other interests.'' In fact, the network/newspaper combines that do ^ the overnight polling came together to preserve journalistic objectivity. ''The Times and CBS News felt they'd been badly burned by candidates' polls prior to 1975-76,'' says Frankovic. Better to find numbers themselves than have to ask Pat Caddell or Wirthlin. True, there are times when the public's reaction is so turbulent that the polls seem schizophrenic -- as with Lieut. Col. Oliver North. Wirthlin had Ollie registering a high 68 on the popularity thermometer (0 to 100). CBS/New York Times found 62% believed Ollie was telling the truth vs. 56% who thought the President was lying. Fifty percent said Ollie was not justified in breaking the law; 64% thought he was a patriot; 74% said he was no national hero. It wasn't until Jeff Alderman, a former Associated Press editor who runs ABC News' polling, added a third choice to the question that a stable opinion began to appear. ''North was playing very well,'' Alderman remembers thinking. ''But they can't think this guy's a hero, and he's too small to be the villain.'' So ABC asked, do you think Col. North is a hero, villain or victim? Victim won by 64%. Fortunately, volatile results are the exception, not the rule. On the big calls, the major polls -- NBC/Wall Street Journal, ABC/Washington Post, and CBS/New York Times -- usually agree. Even Peter Hart and Wirthlin say they rarely varied from each other beyond the normal three-percentage-point margin of error as the 1984 campaign drew to a close. ''It's a new technique for reporting on the least covered but most important factor in any election,'' concludes Stan Opotowsky of ABC. ''We knew how to cover the candidates, but this made us cover the electorate.''

THE RELUCTANT PUBLIC But how closely do the people want to be covered? Often not closely at all. ''Refusals are getting higher -- always 20% or more,'' acknowledges Humphrey Taylor, president of Lou Harris' shop, speaking of those who balk at being interviewed by phone. In large part -- to the frustration of legitimate pollsters -- this resistance comes from the so-called ''phony polls'' that are really disguised sales pitches. The ARF condemns such practices. Even the Census Bureau has run into refusals updating its monthly Current Population Survey. ''We still get a response of 95%,'' says Bailar, ''but it takes more effort than it used to.'' (To check whether a pollster is on the level, ask for his phone number and call him back to see how his organization identifies itself. Never give out sensitive financial information like your bank account or credit-card numbers. And if you get burned, complain to the American Association of Public Opinion Research, P.O. Box 17, Princeton, N.J. 08542; 609-924-8670.) Overcoming that resistance is what keeps male lead David Parkes and ingenue Diane Urbanski dialing late into the night for Louis Harris & Associates under the direction of veteran actor E.J. Decker. Their job is to talk to the refuseniks, to coax them into an interview. Diane is pleasantly soft-voiced, even plays Sleeping Beauty at a children's theater in Greenwich Village, but knows anybody can have a bad night. '' 'Listen to me,' I'll tell E.J. 'I'm getting four or five refusals. I'm doing something wrong.' '' E.J. will listen in on a monitoring line to offer help. ''You're speeding through, you sound like a robot,'' he says. What is needed, adds David, is ''a slightly more conversational tone, so it isn't straight slick. You free-float to their level, play chameleon. Who is this person, how do I relate?'' Wirthlin's low 10% refusal rate may come from drawing on a different pool of interviewers: Mormons. These young people in Provo, Utah have already been on two-year missions to bring converts into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints. They are used to approaching strangers and ''know how to handle rejection,'' Wirthlin says. He takes pride that they once got 94% of a group of respondents who made more than $70,000 a year to tell their incomes.

TRUTH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Such probity in the marketplace is vital, since the polls serve more and more as the compass for American business, but it also raises questions about the right to privacy. That conflict emerges strongly in the debate over release of Census Bureau statistics. By law, the bureau cannot give out information about individuals -- even Japanese Americans during wartime, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1944. ''But other people reach conclusions from our averages,'' says Robert Marx, in charge of mapping for the 1990 census. ''They can't look at our data and recognize any individual person, but they can see the character of a neighborhood. And the chances that you will resemble your neighbor are very good.'' Even some of the market survey researchers admit there is an incipient privacy threat. Robin Page, who thought up many of the snappy nicknames for Claritas' clusters, won't give out his Social Security number. ''That's a little exercise of my own liberty,'' he explains. Besides, Page is perfectly happy to work with what he already has -- ''a damn good probability hit rate at this level of micro-geography.'' But this level of micro-geography is already down to your street. All these systems, Page points out, ''are address-driven.'' Once they have your residence from a subscription list, they can use your demographics to come at you from your blind side. One of the best at doing so is Lynn Pounian, president of Reese Communications Cos., outside Washington, D.C. She and her associates began as Democratic political consultants, doing targeted mailings to gain that 5% shift in the vote that can put a candidate into office. But times have changed, and her last big campaign was for AT&T, running against MCI and Sprint in the plebiscite that decided who would be your long-distance company. Pounian went after the vote by striking deep at the heart -- or lack thereof -- of each neighborhood life-style cluster. Under a blue marble cover, she sent the Technocratic Elite an almost digital appeal, but the Brunch Bunch got a gold-plated mailing that bespoke status, made AT&T look like ''your signature phone service.'' Her cleverest message was to the Agri-Good-Ole-Boys -- basically the same as Claritas' Agri-Business cluster. ''These folks could remember when AT&T was all that kept them in touch with each other out there in the boonies. Do you know that Barbara Mandrell song?'' Out went a mailing piece that pictured telephone poles strung across a lonesome prairie with the wires almost humming the words, We Were Country When Country Wasn't Cool.

A RESPECT FOR THE MARKET ''We truly respect our market, using this kind of system,'' Pounian says. ''Even more to the point, this will be the only way to reach younger voters/buyers. You can't drop your B-52 message down into the crowd anymore -- Father Knows Best, Mom Buys the Groceries. Ronald Reagan understood that and moved away from those mass appeals. They will genuinely disappear over time, with the under-35 set.'' That cohort -- the baby boomers, chiefly the college-educated sons and daughters of working-class parents -- is possibly the most responsive to the TV-to-polls-to-TV functioning of the vox pop machine. ''Where their values will be pricked is at the local level,'' says Pounian. ''That's where they look for their quality of life, react to issues like the environment, schools, ! kids, drugs, out of a grounded, family-oriented, nesting instinct.'' Pollster Paul Maslin calls them the Springsteeners, after Bruce and his songs about working-class heroes. ''They are out on the cusp of change,'' he says. ''Every other generation has made up their minds, but this one hasn't. They are important because they are up for grabs.''

THE COMING STATISTICAL BATTLE The end result could well be Statistical Wars. With the census looming, political parties are hiring demographers, says Bill Williams of Comaps, ''positioning themselves to capture the redistribution of districts.'' And the conflict could spread to business relocation, tax bases, urban migration, even health care. One scheme: run the coding system for Medicare through Claritas' clusters to find which ailment best fits your community, for profit and cure at your nearest hospital. Yet amid this slicing and dicing, something akin to the real America stubbornly emerges. ''The irony,'' says Pounian, ''is that we come full circle back to a personal feeling about people. There's not a single cluster that somebody in this company hasn't lived with, and we gossip about them almost the way you do about friends.'' Norma Rae-Ville? ''They've rejuvenated themselves. They have absorbed the loss of their industries and are coming together.'' Hispanic Mix? ''You reach a certain point in your life, which are you? Middle America or Hispanic?'' New Beginnings? ''They used to be called Bunker's Neighbors, but Archie moved to Florida and now the kids are on their own, surrounded by Springsteeners, trying to made a go of it.'' Bohemian Mix? Pounian can really feel for them, ''with their stomachs protruding over their Levi's. They harken back to the '60s, but their ideology conflicts with their reality. They are spouting nostalgia for Molotov cocktails and wanting a tax break.'' All of the above are data, endless numbers pouring out of the computer, from constant polling and repolling. But she can hardly wait for the next numbers. ''Every month, it's like getting back family snapshots. Gosh, look what they're doing now!''