Sometimes,
I think this new 24-hour news cycle creates more problems than
it solves. Case in point: last week’s FOX
News poll on the 2008 presidential elections. Not content
to inquire about any of the 504 elections we will have in 9 months,
FOX preferred to ask about the one in 33 months. They even saw
fit to ask what people thought about Oprah or Arnold as president.
I was prepared to let this inane poll slide – to silently
wonder how FOX could waste so much airtime pondering the electoral
chances of a man constitutionally barred from the job, but could
no longer find any room for Arrested Development. However,
Gallup
got in the act yesterday, producing its own 2008 poll for CNN
and USA Today. With the gold standard in public opinion
on this bandwagon, this much has become clear: we have to nip
this nonsense in the bud.
So, here
it is. No poll about the next presidential election is worth your
attention until Summer, 2007 at the earliest. The reason for this
is that their predictive power is literally nil. They might help
Martha MacCallum or Daryn Kagan fill the seemingly endless hours
of live “news” coverage, but if your interest is in
what will occur in 2008, they are of no use to you. Political
junkies, take heed. If Shepherd Smith teases a 2008 poll “you
cannot miss”, feel free to change the channel. You can miss
it.
There are
two reasons for this. The first has to do with the nature of the
American electorate. Their opinions tend to change as other factors
change. In the case of electoral politics, as their attention,
interest and knowledge increase, their candidate preferences change.
For 2008, all of these causal factors are today at their low ebb.
The average voter is paying no attention to the initial positioning
for 2008, has no interest in it, and knows nothing about it. This
is why 40% of the victory-starved Democratic electorate supports
known losers. This is why 61% of the Republican electorate supports
a candidate who has major ideological tension with them. What
they give is not their answer; it is just their response.
In other
words, these respondents are offering what professional students
of political behavior call “non-opinions”. It is a
strange, important phenomenon – one that too few professional
poll interpreters appreciate. When you ask a question about which
the respondent has given no thought, the respondent almost always
responds with something. He almost never says, “I don’t
know”, or “I have no opinion”. Instead, he tells
you something. What he tells you is not his opinion. It is his
non-opinion. From where does it come? In early presidential politics,
his response is usually just the name that he hears most often
from the pundit class.
These polls,
therefore, are really nothing more than the conventional wisdom
from the media echoed back to the media. This creates an interesting
cycle – the pundit class speculates about Hillary, Rudy,
etc; the public picks up on this speculation and, when asked what
they think about 2008, because they do not really think anything
yet, just regurgitate the speculation; this induces the pundit
class to speculate more about Hillary, Rudy, etc.
There is
no dishonesty on the part of the public here. The echo chamber
exists in this way because people feel compelled to give an answer.
It seems like the right thing to do when asked a question by a
pollster. He wants your opinion, you should give him one. With
virtually no knowledge on the subject, upon what else can a respondent
draw except what he has picked up in dribs and drabs from the
pundit class?
As we move
closer to the next presidential election, the electorate will
start to pay more attention and will start to consider the race
more carefully. Non-opinions will become real opinions; it is
only then that these polls will tell us something about the election.
The poll results will also begin to change – as attention,
interest and knowledge increase, opinions will change from what
they “are” today. Thus, the polls today bear no reflection
to the polls tomorrow. This makes today’s polls useless
– unless you are interested in non-opinion dynamics.
The second
reason is that the polling firms ask the wrong people.
This problem manifests itself in two distinct ways. Consider the
Gallup poll. Gallup reported the combined results of registered
Democrats and Democratic “leaners”. The problem
with this is that, in many states, being a “Democratic leaner”
is not enough for you to vote in a primary. In Pennsylvania, for
instance, you cannot go to your precinct at primary time and say,
“I really like the Democrats, but I’m a registered
independent.” They will not let you vote in the Democratic
primary. Thus, the sample is skewed – by how much and in
what way, it is impossible to say. Nevertheless, there is a skew.
Furthermore, we know from experience that the national set of
registered Democratic voters do not select the Democratic
presidential candidate. That privilege is reserved for at most
one third of the Democratic electorate. The latter two-thirds
merely ratify the choice of the former. With the new primary schedules
of both parties, it would be a wonder if either race remains unsettled
by Super Tuesday. So, why on Earth is Gallup asking a national
sample whom they wish to have serve as each party’s nominee?
Even if the Democratic or Republican bases did possess something
more than a set of non-opinions, this poll would be unable to
gauge what those imply for the actual horse race.
These polls
do nothing more than facilitate the endless, pointless blather
that comes the media. It is a way for paid commentators who have
nothing to say to fill the programming void. Sometimes, silence
is golden. So is Arrested Development. They should put
that back on, instead!
