Q. Whitfield “Whit” Ayres, one of the nation’s
leading political consultants and pollsters, remembers the first time,
in 1985, when he was on the national platform of the Presbyterian Church
(USA).
He describes it as a “radicalizing experience” – and he
helped make it so.
Having been a moderator of the Trinity Presbytery in South Carolina,
Ayres was serving as moderator of the denomination’s Peacemaking
and International Committee during the height of the
Nicaragua-Sandinista controversy.
“The staff had written what I considered to be an amazingly biased
and one-sided resolution condemning the United States for its opposition
to the Sandinistas,” Ayres said. “I took it upon myself to
write an alternative resolution.”
Whit Ayres
Ayres, 51, took an unexpected tack. Rather than compliantly
follow the staff’s recommendation, he stepped down as chairman of
the committee and proposed his own resolution calling on both the Soviet
Union and the United States to let the people of Nicaragua decide their
own fate.
“There was a measure of shock from the General Assembly staff who
weren’t so used to uppity behavior from their moderator,”
Ayres said. “Of course, my resolution was defeated overwhelmingly.”
Ayres tells the story to highlight what he believes still continues –
a staff-dominated decision-making process that leads to General Assembly
support for questionable positions.
While his proposal was rejected, Ayres, then a political science
professor at the University of South Carolina and a congressional fellow
of the American Political Science Association, did not go unnoticed.
John Boone, a director of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, observed the
articulate professor and invited him to become a member of Presbyterians
for Democracy and Religious Freedom, now known as Presbyterian Action
for Faith and Freedom.
Later, the Presbyterian Lay Committee elected Ayres to become one its
directors.
Manipulation by the denomination’s staff still is a major factor
in the decision-making process, Ayres says.
“I realized in a very personal way how loaded the system is, how
virtually all of the resolutions are written by the staff from a
particular ideological perspective. I came to realize that the outcome
of most of the General Assembly actions is predetermined before the
assembly ever meets.
“If you let me provide the initial draft, provide the resource
people, randomly assign a commissioner with no expertise in the
committee’s subject area, then I could project the outcome nearly
100 percent of the time.”
Ayres was born and reared in Ames, Iowa, where his Episcopalian father
was an engineering professor and his mother was an educator.
He left Iowa to study at Davidson College in North Carolina, intending
to become a lawyer. But that goal was waylaid by a passion for politics
and government.
After graduating from Davidson
cum laude with a degree in
political science, Ayres taught American history and civics to
eighth-grade students in South Carolina for three years. Then, he
attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earning master’s
and Ph.D. degrees in political science.
During his graduate school days, his faith in Christ came alive through
reading the works of C.S. Lewis and other Christian writers.
Today, he is president of Ayres, McHenry & Associates, Inc., a
national public opinion and public affairs research firm located in
metropolitan Atlanta.
Roll Call, a widely-read newspaper on Capitol Hill, called the
firm “one of the best in the nation.”
Campaigns and Elections Magazine described Ayres as one of the
political world’s “movers and shakers.”
Ayres began his political consultant business as a way to settle down
and end years of commuter marriage.
For the first 10 years of their marriage, Ayres and Rebecca Ison Ayres,
a pediatric radiologist, were holding forth in towns far apart because
of their professions. Ayres says he wanted to become a university
administrator, but realized that required a peripatetic lifestyle.
So, in 1991, he began the polling business.
The firm’s political clients include U.S. senators Paul Coverdell
of Georgia, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, and Strom Thurmond of South
Carolina; Bill Frist of Tenn.; Governors David Beasley and Carroll
Campbell of South Carolina; Georgia congressmen Saxby Chambliss and Bob
Barr, and the 1996 Lamar Alexander for President campaign.
Corporate clients include Georgia-Pacific Corporation, AT&T, Blue
Cross/Blue Shield, The Home Depot, the American Association of Health
Plans, the Business Council of Alabama, the American Council of Life
Insurance and the Sea Island Company.
Ayres’ comments analyzing American politics have appeared in
The
Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los
Angeles Times, USA Today, The Atlanta Constitution, ABC Nightly
News, NBC News, the Today show, CNN’s Inside Politics, National
Public Radio, C-SPAN and numerous regional newspapers.
And what is a Christian’s responsibility in politics?
“I’m engaged in an advocacy process which, of necessity,
involves conflict,” Ayres said. “Put simply for a Christian,
it means you try to fight fairly. It doesn’t mean that you refrain
from conflict because that’s a part of the political process, just
as it’s part of our legal process. But it does mean that you
refrain from taking the cheap shot, that you refrain from distorting an
opponents position, that you refrain from stabbing people in the back.”
Ayres, an elder and member of Roswell Presbyterian Church, says he
rarely is surprised by the results of one of his polls. But one was an
exception. He polled hospital employees for a health-care corporation.
“One of our charges was to find out which employees were most
satisfied and happiest in their jobs,” he said.
“I fully expected the employees of the obstetrics unit to be the
happiest, because they’re dealing with well patients for the most
part. But the folks who felt the happiest and most rewarded were those
in the hospice program. Every single employee felt they were making a
difference in the lives of their patients and that their work was
valuable and important.”
Ayres is not optimistic about the future of the Presbyterian Church
(USA).
“The views seem so sharp and the points of view so far apart that
it is difficult to foresee a future where everyone stays under the same
umbrella,” he said.
Ayres is no longer a member of the Presbyterian Lay Committee's
board of directors.