POLLS APART

2020

I am troubled by political polls. I believe they do serve a purpose, but only for internal use by political parties to gauge how well their ideas are being received by the people and whether or not they need to make adjustments to their policies and platforms. It’s when polls are made public that they become troublesome, because I believe they can and do influence potential voters, particularly those who fall into the undecided category. Let’s face it: People love to be identified with winners, and it’s arguable that at least some people who can’t make up their minds – and there could be millions of them during national campaigns – could be lured to the side the polls declare is ahead at the ultimate expense of their own self-interests or that of the public as a whole.
A larger problem with polls is their accuracy, even when they declare margins of error. There are a multitude of political polls out there, and if they were accurate within their margins of error, their numbers should all be reasonably close, right? They’re not; they’re all over the spectrum, and people can be easily misled about the nation’s temperament depending on which poll they’re looking at. Voters are unnecessarily panicked or exhilarated … until maybe the next poll appears. Polling experts suggest that the best way to determine their validity is to take the average of all of them together.
Even that’s no guarantee of accuracy. I’ve participated in a lot of polls over the course of my lifetime, and I’ve noticed the one thing they all seem to have in common is their questions are too general and too broad. There’s no place for responding: “Yes, I’m mostly in favor, but …” Nuance is not taken into account, and rarely is anything in life as simple or black and white as the pollsters want to think it is. I might think a party’s proposal it asks my opinion on has some merit, but there are other things about it I don’t like or agree with. How do I answer it when a simple yes or no is not sufficient? A “no opinion” response does not reflect my view either.
The questions in some polls are clearly designed to elicit the desired response, and then the party asks for a donation at the end. It’s obvious the party doesn’t really care what I think. All it really wants is my money, and I sincerely doubt the results of such polls are even tallied and studied because they’re so meaningless.
Turning a deaf ear to the true mood of the people is a turnoff. For all these reasons I no longer respond to political polls.
The media does a disservice to the public by releasing polls and allowing pundits to overreact during the early weeks of the Presidential primaries, causing unnecessary angst among voters and panic among potential campaign contributors. Take last winter, for example. Before the first primaries Joe Biden was considered to be the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. When he fared poorly in the first three primaries or caucuses in New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada – small states with a grand total of 16 electoral votes out of 538 to be counted on election night – while Bernie Sanders piled up an early lead, many influential pundits wrote off Biden and claimed his poor performance had left his campaign war chest nearly empty and he was on the verge of dropping out.
As a career newspaperman myself, now retired, I understand there are news holes the media has to fill every day and pressure to fill them, and the “bigger” the story the media outlets can print or broadcast, the more readers and viewers they will attract. But those “bigger” stories are all too often overplayed and given gravitas they do not really deserve and do nothing but agitate and falsely encourage or discourage the public. The reality is the early primaries are like baseball spring training: absolutely meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and the media are misleading the public by pretending they’re not.
As a sportswriter I covered many spring trainings, and during those six weeks there were really only two or three stories of genuine significance worth following. One was how well a player was coming back from a serious injury the previous season. Another was a serious injury to a key player that occurred during spring training. The other might be a trade with another team. But I had to write stories every single day to help fill the sports pages, and most of them were insignificant regardless how big the headline might have been. Because when the first pitch was thrown on Opening Day, all the stories I had written about a player holding out for a better contract, who showed up to camp late or a few pounds overweight, and the rookie flash who wasn’t going to make the club anyway, were instantly forgotten. There’s a saying in the newspaper biz that there’s nothing deader than yesterday’s newspaper. Most of the spring training stories I wrote were dead on arrival, and the same can be said of early spring pundits in election years. But the political damage they cause can be lasting.
Super Tuesday was Opening Day for the primaries, and nearly everything that had been written or aired about the candidates until then became largely irrelevant. Biden rolled, the cash flowed into his campaign coffers, and he locked up the nomination a few months later.
But pollsters continue to mislead the public during the months leading up to the election and, I do believe, can influence the outcome. Most of the polls predicted an easy win for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and she did win the popular vote. But she lost typically Democratic strongholds Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a grand total of 106,000 votes out of nearly 136 million cast nationwide. Who knows how many Democratic voters in those three states might have stayed home, thinking their votes weren’t needed, because they believed the polls? Had she won those three states, she would be President today and not Donald Trump.
I also believe exit polls should not be made public until after the election, and some states have tried to pass legislation to prohibit them but have run up against the First Amendment. It has been argued that voters in the five states in the Pacific and far western time zones – California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii with their combined total of 81 electoral votes and where the polls are still open anywhere from three to six hours after they have closed in the East – have sometimes been too discouraged to vote on their way home from work when exit polls indicate the race has already been decided. Ditto for Arizona and its 11 electoral votes, where the polls are open for another two hours after closing in the East. The networks have agreed not to release the results of exit polls from each state until the polls have closed in that state, but they can still influence the actions of voters in the far western states. And unless it’s an obvious landslide one way or the other, I fervently hope the networks resist the temptation to scoop the others by declaring a winner on the night of November 3-4 while tens of millions of mail-in ballots remain to be counted over the next several days and sow unnecessary confusion and dissension among the citizenry.
My advice? Spare yourself the gut-wrenching anxiety. Don’t put much credence in political polls and just vote your conscience.