How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Polls

I hate polls – hate them like a fox. After nearly two years of digitally fornicating with RealClearPolitics.com (RCP), and more recently, fivethirtyeight.com and pollster.com, certain patterns have emerged. Patterns? Yes, that is the point of it all.

Since it is a forgone conclusion that all who are intelligent distrust polls, why do we keep following them? Imagine a stage production involving political polls, their media outlets and audience. The sublime hilarity is surely worthy of Monty Python or at the very least a recurring SNL routine. Imagine for a moment...

News Anchor: And now to the latest polls. Candidate A with hoobity percent and candidate B with doobity percent. Let’s go to our analysts who will help us digest these figures.

Analyst A: Clearly this is just a poll. Just last week the hoobity and the doobity were reversed. Polls can’t be trusted America.

Analyst B: While I agree that polls are not everything, they do mean something, and as we all know, doobity is more than hoobity…A would have believe that this is mere coincidence.

Analyst A: When Candidate A bounces back next week after a stirring set of commercials featuring rural mechanics and janitors, B will regret those words.

Analyst B: Sounds like excuses to me America. The polls speak for themselves.

News Anchor: There you have it America. I should note that Analyst A and Analyst B are in no way associated with Candidate A and Candidate B, how ever their last names might bear a resemblance.

People, including this author, are fickle – some more than others, but in the end, we are drops in a tidal ebb and flow that follows that whims and fancies of two idiots dancing on stage. John Stewart summed it up best in 2004 when indicating that we must of course take into consideration the poll's “margin of error of completely wrong”

But that would make me the bigger fool for following the play-by-play of this foolish game for nearly two years. Polls are political pornography. The print versions are nice to have on camping trips when you have a few minutes to kill, but the internet has unleashed its harder, better, faster, stronger (and more addictive) incarnation.

If a sign of the times is the immediacy of information, then online polls are at the heart of today’s emerging media. So what? The relative newness of the medium has enabled a few tricks that have gone relatively unnoticed. RCP for example has recently indicated a small surge for John McCain. RCP is a poll aggregator, a compiler of articles and essays as well as a producer of original opinion articles as well. What RCP does not do is analyze who does the polling and how they do it. Polls, pure and simple…or rather, real clear. It is not the fault of RCP that they do not digest the polls for its readers. In a 24 hour news cycle, the best means of feigning neutrality is presenting undigested data. A close look at the most recent polls shows that almost all of McCain’s gains were compiled by Fox News, the American Research Group (ARG) and Mason-Dixon. Further digging reveals that these three pollsters, especially the latter two almost always give the conservative candidate a bump of a few percentage points. Polls in Ohio and Virginia over the four weeks show Obama ahead in every single poll, except in those conducted by this conservative triumvirate – patterns!

Let me be real clear here. This is not a conservative conspiracy. Both sides play the game – the conservatives are merely more organized and concerted in their efforts. CBS polls almost always slant towards the progressive candidate. But the slew of Fox News, ARG and Mason Dixon polls released in battleground states on the day before the election were certainly no accident. We all love a good competition. Down to the wire yet again. Anything less would be uncivilized.

Poll analysis is an emerging science that will only gain momentum with each passing election. To say that they are imperfect is missing the point. No matter how many times it is beat into our heads, plumbers from the Midwest do not offer the most objective and honest picture of “real America”. As much as I distrust ARG and Fox News, I would rather listen to them than Joe the Plumber. Public anger towards polls is more a result of our inability to question data. People are easily questionable. Numbers do not lie. If they do not lie, then why are they so often wrong? When we cannot cope with such mysteries, we blame the medium itself and vent.

The importance of polls will only increase. There are two potential paths we may take as a country. We may apply a greater degree of scrutiny, thereby allowing us to digest the numbers in a more meaningful manner so as to inform our decisions. Or we will all become addicts of political fantasy sports and allow the horse race to dominate our public intellectual space. But polls are not going anywhere. Like porn, if polls were worthless, we would have abandoned them long ago.

For all your sports fans out there, here are my predictions:

Obama: 353 Electoral Votes

McCain: 185 Electoral Votes

Bob Barr: Winner of the 2008 Ralph Nader Lifetime Achievement Scapegoat Award