The origin of “dog whistle politics”

With dog whistle politics in the news today, it’s time to dust off one of the curios of our language that often intrigues me – even relatively modern phrases, first penned well into the electronic age, can be rather hard to pin down.

As for dog whistle politics itself, the earliest use on record (I think) is this from Richard Morin in the Washington Post (October 16, 1988, “Behind the Numbers: Confessions Of a Pollster” p.C1):

About 15 percent more people were “very happy” when the alternative was being merely “fairly happy.” Maybe they were really that happy, or maybe the pollsters offered them unacceptable choices. Anyway, researchers call this the “Dog Whistle Effect”: Respondents hear something in the question that researchers do not.

It’s clearly not the first use of that phrase given the reference to what researchers say, even though it can’t have been that common at the time as Google Books doesn’t throw up the phrase in any books written about opinion research in the twentieth century.

The phrase spread more widely in political circles following its application to the election tactics of Australian PM John Howard. The first example of that I can find is this from The Dominion (New Zealand) (December 16, 1997, “Election Fight On Race Issue” p.8) talking of the elections over in Australia:

Labor’s spokesman on aboriginal affairs has already accused Mr Howard of “dog-whistle politics”—in rejecting a race election, he actually sent a high-pitched signal to those attuned to hear it.

Now, excuse me whilst I go back to trying to track down the real origin of the phrase “u-turn”… (I’ve found one usage earlier than the earliest one mentioned online – thank you Sam Coates of The Times – but not there yet).