Polls Creating False Expectations

According to biographers Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, James Baker III was the man who ran Washington. I have only just started reading their book, but I can already recommend it-- for being fair, comprehensive and highly appreciative.

One may agree or disagree, but Baker knew how to get things done. You might not always have liked what he did, but clearly the Reagan presidency would not have been as successful if he had not been in charge of the White House for its first four years.

This morning Baker weighs in on the matter of political polling. He is especially concerned about the quantity of bad polling in the last two presidential elections. And he suggests, rightly, that the polling is not just bad or incompetent, but that it is undermining democracy.

He writes:

It would be funny if it weren’t a sad reality that American democracy is being undermined by bad polling that consistently favors one side over the other. Though not as ingrained in our national heritage as politicians and the press, polling is an important component in the governance of the nation, as it presents snapshots of the positions Americans take on the challenges that confront us. Elected leaders, candidates for public office and constituents often rely on polling as they make their choices on issues that affect the health of the nation.

How does this skew election campaigns?

Polls that repeatedly favor one side create false expectations that adversely influence the actions of both sides. The favored side becomes overconfident and suffers when the results on Election Day don’t meet expectations. And the disfavored side is disadvantaged in both fundraising and voter turnout by the appearance that the outcome is foreordained.

Baker calls consistently biased polling a form of voter suppression:

Sadly, Americans too often don’t get straight information from pollsters. When this is done knowingly or intentionally, it could be considered a form of voter suppression. For weeks this fall, Americans received a daily dispatch telling them that Donald Trump was facing a loss of near-historic proportions. At the same time, we were confidently assured that Democrats would take control of the Senate and add to their lead in the House. We were also assured that the pollsters had corrected their well-noted mistakes of 2016, when they predicted that Hillary Clinton would become the 45th president.

Today’s pollsters, people who have been indoctrinated into believing that there is no such thing as objective fact, do not care to present things as they are. They present things as they wish they were:

Their role should simply be to reflect reality as it stands by presenting an honest and candid view of the public’s attitudes toward the issues and the candidates. One could draw the conclusion that some pollsters present a picture of what they want the country to become rather than what it really is. Instead, they should strive to be unbiased reporters of the facts and not participants in the political contest. Nor should they be activists hoping to promote a new reality.