A Bankrupt Industry

Polling 

Let’s assume a fantasy world for a moment, a world where polls are wildly accurate.  What good are they? Do they help people make decisions? They shouldn’t.  Isn’t it better if decisions are made based on data and policies rather than what a group of people might or might not believe? Just how are polls used in a political environment other than to give the media something to speculate about. 

Now let’s get back to the real world where recent events have shown polls to be wildly inaccurate? The same questions need to be asked.  Do they provide any value to the decision-making process at all? Even considering the margin-of-error (I.e., the CYA factor that basically says take all these numbers with a salt mine as they might be completely wrong) do they help us in any way. 

I submit not. The polling industry is a house of cards, an emperor with no clothes, merely another excuse for “journalists” to have something to talk and speculate about. It’s a defective product that we didn’t need in the first place but comes with no money-back-guarantee unlike every other product. A product that pretends to be scientific but is just vapor.  

Polling distorts the political process as it forces politicians to focus on a subset of the population and yet that data has been shown to be wrong. Dare we nominate Sanders? Based on polling data, we know he can’t win.  Really? Trump can’t win, so we need to distance ourselves from him.  Really? Polling is distorting the political process by delivering messages to voters that are most likely to be wrong.  If I am told the polls show Biden with a 17 point lead over Trump, should I bother going to the polls? Polling also changes expectations. If Biden supporters expect a huge win and it doesn’t happen, then they have less reason to accept the results. 

Worse, polling changes the nature of reporting. Time is now spent on speculating and guessing what might happen, rather than reporting what has happened. Decisions should be made based on what has happened rather than what might. Pollsters, in their defense, argue that their polls in 2016 were correct when they were taken the day of the election.  I don’t need that.  The election was objective proof of what people thought.  Who needs polls to tell me what I already know?