Bogus Polls: Meaningless Farce Or Looming Tragedy?
by Arianna Huffington
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The dirty little secret of the polling industry is that, all too often, its findings are based on flawed methodology and dubious assumptions.
Take that mid-September Gallup poll that found Kerry had plummeted 14 points behind Bush. It sure made it seem as if Kerry were as good as done for, right? And that's the way it was widely reported by everybody, especially Gallup's media partners, USA Today and CNN. The problem is, the poll was absurdly weighted in favor of GOP voters, assuming that on Election Day 40 percent of those casting a ballot will be Republicans and only 33 percent will be Democrats — a turnout breakdown that will only happen in Karl Rove's dreams.
Democrats have accounted for 39 percent of those voting in the last two presidential elections, while Republicans accounted for no more than 35 percent in either 1996 or 2000.
It's like they say about computers: garbage in, garbage out. With polls, it's faulty data in, faulty findings out.
Yet polls are now firmly entrenched as the lingua franca of political analysis. Dissecting the latest numbers is so much easier than actually, y'know, digging for the truth. Cable shows love turning the campaign into a horse race. And it's so much easier if you can parade fatuous numbers as hardcore facts to prove Who's Hot and Who's Not.
Trouble is, these "snapshots of the electorate" quickly harden into portraits, and, in the blink of an eye, guesstimates become the conventional wisdom.
And in politics, as in sports, everybody loves a winner. Thus, as soon as the pollsters delivered Bush his hyper-inflated post-convention bounce, many of the Democratic faithful started seeing the ghosts of Mike Dukakis and Fritz Mondale lurking around every corner. By the same light, now that Bush has supposedly hit the polling skids, the shadow of his Dad's one-and-done presidency has begun to darken the GOP base's doorstep.
These kinds of poll-induced mood swings can have a profound impact on a campaign. The sense that a candidate is tanking — or on a roll — can make the difference between a potential donor making a contribution or keeping his checkbook in his pocket. It can also tip the scales for a would-be volunteer deciding whether to give up more free time to go door-to-door registering voters or work the phones to get out the vote.
I saw firsthand the effect that manufactured momentum has as I traveled around the country speaking. Again and again last month, I was told by Kerry supporters that the gloomy poll numbers hanging over their man's campaign had made them less likely to donate their time and money.
This is how polls morph from meaningless farce into potential tragedy — self-fulfilling prophesies that end up making more likely whatever results they predict while, at the same time, undermining the democratic process.
But despite mounting evidence that poll results can't be trusted, pundits and politicians continue to treat them with a reverence ancient Romans reserved for chicken entrails, ignoring the fact that pollsters are finding it increasingly difficult to get people to talk to them. Thanks to answering machines, caller ID and telemarketers, polling response rates have plunged to 30 percent — and lower. It's pretty hard getting a good read on the public's opinion when people keep hanging up on you.
Plus, pollsters never call cell phones — of which there are now close to 170 million. And even though most cell phone users also have a hard line, a growing number don't — especially young people, an underpolled and hard-to-gauge demographic that could easily turn out to be the margin of difference in this year's race.
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More:
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/column.php?id=737
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