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Jayne: Survey says: Polls are popular, but not to be trusted

By Greg Jayne
Published: December 13, 2015, 6:01am

Public-opinion polls show that 83 percent of readers will love this column, 2 percent won’t like it, and 15 percent will use it to line the cat box.

Of course, I made all of that up; surely the love rate for my columns is in the high 90s. Isn’t it? I simply felt the need to embrace the modern ethos that says every public opinion can be quantified by percentages that then are presented as unquestioned facts.

Hey, if it works for our political process, then certainly it’s good enough to measure the tastes of The Columbian’s readers. And, as a cursory glance at the cable news networks at any time on any day reveals, our political process is being overrun by polls. There are headlines telling us what the latest polls think of Donald Trump, or what they think of Hillary Clinton’s emails, or how many people believe Ted Cruz is from the planet Krypton. Trust me, if pollsters asked “Do you agree that Ted Cruz is from the planet Krypton?,” plenty of people would answer in the affirmative to avoid appearing ill-informed.

All of which is interesting, considering that Jill Lepore wrote recently for New Yorker magazine, that “A 2013 study — a poll — found that three out of four Americans suspect polls of bias.”

I long have been suspect of the results from public-opinion polls, primarily for two reasons: They profess to tell us what we think, or at least what our neighbors think; and they can be easily skewed by the nature of the questions asked.

And now we have the fact that most people decline the opportunity to participate in polls. According to Lepore, when public-opinion surveys first emerged in the 1930s, about 90 percent of people who were asked would oblige. Now, that percentage typically is in single digits — and a federal law that prevents pollsters from calling cellphones skews the pool of potential respondents.

Not that any of that renders polls completely useless; I’m as guilty as anybody when it comes to using them to support a particular point. When the Pew Research Center reports that 55 percent of Americans think average people could do a better job of running the country than politicians, I think that’s interesting and want to share the information.

But the reliability of any poll, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder. The key is finding polling organizations that have proven a track record of accuracy.

In 2012, Mitt Romney’s pollsters were convinced even on the morning of the election that he would win the presidency. This led to an apoplectic Karl Rove having an on-air meltdown during the Fox News coverage of election results that revealed Barack Obama would be re-elected. The polls — Romney’s polls — couldn’t be wrong because, well, they just couldn’t.

As an aside, Fox delivered perhaps the greatest poll in recent polling history when they asked the public in October 2014, “How are things going in the world today?” Of the respondents, 58 percent said, “To hell in a handbasket.” The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percent.

Masquerading as news

Yet, while polls can be useful, these days they too often masquerade as news. CNN has turned this into an art form, with Thursday’s headlines on its website trumpeting no less than six stories about various polls relating to the presidential campaign. Never mind that nobody will even cast a primary ballot for another two months, or that we would be better served learning about the candidates instead of being told what we purportedly think. As Lepore writes: “Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: Frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic.”

She also pointed out that in October, Trump said: “Somebody said, ‘You love polls.’ I said that only because I’ve been winning every single one of them. Right? Right? Every single one.” Two days later, after he had slipped behind Ben Carson in some polls, Trump said: “I honestly think those polls are wrong.”

So, public-opinion polls are accurate except for the times they are inaccurate. But they’re always good for lining the cat box.

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