The poop (literally) on polls

I've often written about polls and expressed my misgivings, largely because I have first-hand knowledge about their role in today's media.

Have a story or point of view you want to advance? Easy. Run a poll. Fashion the questions in a way that will guarantee the results you want to "back up" that point of view. And carefully tilt the kind of people you "poll" to further those results.

This campaign season once again shows how meaningless these "polls" really are.

A half-dozen times or so, I've walked into work to cat-calls from my more Liberal colleagues about a New York Times poll or Washington Post poll or ABC poll ... all, of course, showing Barack Obama with a sudden nine-point lead or 10-point lead or whatever.

The last time this happened was about a week or so ago. I believe it was a Washington Post poll that suddenly had Obama with a 10-point lead after weeks and weeks of a much tighter race. Of course, one needs to peel back several layers of what's reported and look at who was polled, first of all.

Naturally, none in the media (including the Washington Post itself) disclosed the fact that the sampling included nine percent more people who identified themselves as Democrats than did so as Republicans.

So in reality, given the fact that the vast majority of those who have a particular party affiliation vote along that party's line, what is this poll worth?

Well, a lot to the media. These people know that most folks don't peel back ANY layer to look closely. Most see a headline, and that's the extent of their "knowlege" of the news. A handful read the first three paragraphs of a story. Relatively few make ANY attempt to actually educate themselves.

And the result? In this campaign season, particularly lately, Liberals get to thump their chests. Conservatives fret. Hopefully, the media schemes, many will throw in the towel.

Isn't that what happened in 2004? The "media" reported half the day that these "exit polls" showed a Kerry landslide. The effort was to convince Western states in particular and voters everywhere who were going to cast theirs late in the day that the game was over.

It obviously wasn't, was it?

It's sad, but if we in this country bought automobiles the way we buy "news," car mechanics would be the richest people on earth.

There's a story at the top of Yahoo's home page today that illustrates my point in neon.

The headline: Poll: Voters souring on McCain; Obama holding steady.

This rather long story goes into great detail for paragraph after paragraph about, well, just what the headline says.

Here's the next-to-last paragraph:

The AP-Yahoo! News poll included 841 likely voters was conducted from Oct. 3-13 and has an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. Included were interviews with 373 people who initially said they were Democrats, 252 Republicans and 214 independents, for whom the margins of sampling error are plus or minus 5.1, 6.2 and 6.7 percentage points, respectively.

Now what do you realistically expect a poll to "reveal" when 44.4 percent of the people polled are Democrats and only 30 percent are Republicans?

This is legitimate news? C'mon people!

The best part of this particular "poll"? What the story does NOT say but what's included in the entire poll report, is that among these "likely voters", 44 percent say they'll vote for Obama, 42 percent for McCain.

You'd think that in a poll that included 14 percent more Democrats than Republicans, the fact that only two percent more people saying they'll vote for the Democrat than the Republican would somehow find its way into the story, if not BE THE STORY.

Why isn't it even IN the story? Take a wild guess.

(Imported from Oct. 17, 2008)