@hightor,
It doesn’t bother you that *polls* are being manipulated to mislead the public about an election?
Here’s your proof—as if you really needed it.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/articles/polling-public-opinion-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/amp/
If you took a public opinion poll about polls, odds are that a majority would offer some rather unfavorable views of pollsters and the uses to which their work is put. Many potential respondents might simply slam down their telephones. Yet if you asked whether politicians, business leaders, and journalists should pay attention to the people’s voices, almost everyone would say yes. And if you then asked whether polls are, at least, one tool through which the wishes of the people can be discerned, a reluctant majority would probably say yes to that too.
Several conundrums of public opinion polling are enfolded in this hypothetical tale. People of all kinds, activists and ordinary citizens alike, regularly cite polls, especially those that find them in the majority. But people are deeply skeptical of polls, especially when opinion moves in the “wrong” direction.
Some of their doubts are about pollsters’ methods. Do they ask the right questions? Are they manipulating the wording of questions to get the responses they want? And whom did they interview? Some of the doubts are wrapped up in a mistrust of the political parties, marketers, and media giants that pay for the polls.
The imaginary example also shows that it matters greatly how the pollsters ask their questions. Sometimes, respondents offer opinions on subjects about which they have not thought much and do not care at all. People sometimes answer pollsters’ questions just to be polite—because they figure they probably ought to have an opinion. That gives pollsters a lot of running room to “manufacture” opinion, especially on issues of narrow rather than wide concern.
Even when people have strong views, a single polling question rarely captures those views well. Human beings are complicated and so are their opinions. Using the findings of our example, enemies of polls could cite the public’s doubts to “prove” that the public is against polls. Friends of polls could note that the public, however grudgingly, agrees that polls are one tool for gauging public opinion and that leaders should consult public opinion. They could thus “prove” that the public embraces polls. Both ways of looking at the findings would use reality to distort reality.
This issue of the Brookings Review examines how polls work, what they can teach us about public opinion, and what role public opinion does and should play in our democracy. We bring to this magazine a straightforward bias in favor of polling, shaped, in part, by our early professional experiences. Mann spent much of his graduate school time at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center and then conducted polls for congressional candidates in the 1970s. Dionne did graduate work with a heavy focus on public opinion and helped start the New York Times/CBS News Poll in 1975. We share a belief that the study of what citizens think about politics and policy is a genuine contribution to democracy. It’s especially important in democracies whose politicians claim their mandates from the people and regularly insist that they represent the views and interests of the people. To ask the people, with regularity, for their own thoughts strikes us as being both useful and a check on the claims of those in power.
But it is precisely because of our respect for polling that we are disturbed by many things done in its name. When interest groups commission pollsters to ask leading questions to gather “scientific” proof that the public agrees with whatever demand they are making on government, they demean polling and mislead the public. When analysts, sometimes innocently, use poll numbers as a definitive guide to public opinion even on issues to which most people have given little thought, they are writing fiction more than citing fact. When political consultants use information gathered through polling and focus groups to camouflage their clients’ controversial policies with soothing, symbol-laden, and misleading rhetoric, they frustrate democratic deliberation.
