New No-on-522 ad highlights the fact that the other side is using paid actors as spokespeople.

OLYMPIA, Oct. 21.—An astonishing swing in polling shows that this year’s only hotly contested statewide ballot measure is now a horse race – Initiative 522, which would require warning labels for foods with genetically modified ingredients, is ahead by just 46-42.

So says pollster Stuart Elway, who conducted his first poll on the statewide ballot measure last month, just before the TV ads started running. It is one of the most astounding switcheroos he has seen, he says – before the ads hit, I-522 was looking like a slam-dunk, at 66-21.

That’s a 41-point shift in a month. “I’ve spent time looking at all the polling that we have done over the last 20 years and there hasn’t been a swing like this,” he says.

Make no mistake, the labeling measure is still ahead. But now it appears that the outcome comes down to the undecided voters in the middle, and that the momentum is with the No-on-522 campaign. And there is another conclusion that might be drawn — advertising works.

First Poll Was Before TV Launch

Won’t cost a dime? Scene from a Yes-on-522 ad that debuted last month.

It is one of the biggest-spending ballot-measure campaigns in state history, though it is unlikely to beat the $32.4 million spent on I-1183, the liquor-privatization campaign of 2011. The labeling measure is a replay of a similar proposal last year in the state of California that fell just shy of passage, and would make Washington the first state to require food manufacturers to label products made with genetically modified ingredients.

Pollster Stuart Elway.

On one side are food activists, markets that specialize in organic products, and a bevy of out-of-state commercial interests eager for a first clear-cut victory on the food front. They have raised $6.2 million. On the other are food manufacturers and biotech companies who have put up most of the $17.1 million raised so far for the opposition campaign. And most of that is showing up in television ads that started airing Sept. 16. The activists call it a right-to-know measure; the opponents call it an effort to drive genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, off the market, by creating a stigma that will force manufacturers to reformulate food products for Washington consumers and drive up food prices.

What Elway found with his poll is that the ads appear to be hitting home. His first poll was conducted the second week of September, just before the TV ads debuted. The new poll of 413 voters was conducted Oct. 15-17, after a month of exposure. When pollsters asked voters why they chose one side or the other, Elway said the results were striking: Voters cited the arguments they saw on TV. People who saw primarily one side’s ads generally took that position, but when they saw both sides, the opposition led 3 to 1.

“All of these things indicate the ads are working,” Elway says. “But the opponents’ ads may be working better.”

It might also go to show that before the ads hit in September, few Washington voters knew a thing about the measure.

All the Reason for More Ads

The poll results are bound to invigorate efforts to blanket the air with ads in the two weeks that remain before election day, meaning plenty of entertainment for those television viewers who are starved for paid political programming in this otherwise-tepid off-year campaign season. “I think it just shows that the more voters know about 522, the less they like it,” says Dana Bieber, spokeswoman for the no campaign. “And I think that is because voters realize that it provides misleading and inaccurate information that is of no benefit or use to us as consumers. I think that when voters start to really look into it a little more, they start to realize this is misleading, it is costly and it is unfair, and it doesn’t get us what anybody is looking for.”

Meanwhile, the yes side points out that it is still ahead in the Elway poll – though by nowhere near the margin seen at the start of the campaign. “The new Elway poll shows that despite being outspent 3-to-1, Washingtonians still support Yes on 522 and more information about their groceries,” says spokeswoman Elizabeth Larter.

Elway notes that the swing against 522 is so big that it flouts conventional campaign patterns – initiatives generally lose support on the way to election day, as negative advertising blankets the airwaves. But never so much in so short a time. If 522 ends up failing, it will be one for the books. Elway looks back on the last 20 years of polling data and notes that of 22 initiatives that polled more than 60 percent support in September, 17 of them passed. History is on the side of I-522, he says, but not the momentum.

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