If it seems to you that there have been a lot more polls this year than in elections past, it’s because there have been.
There has been an explosion of polls this presidential election. Through yesterday, there have been 728 national polls with head-to-head matchups of the candidates, 215 in October alone. In 2004, there were just 239 matchup polls, with 67 of those in October. At this rate, there may be almost as many national polls in October of 2008 as there were during the entire year in 2004.
It’s no wonder that so many of us feel baffled by the sheer blinding number of polls. This month alone we’ve seen two new matuchup polls a day.
What have we gained from the plethoral of polls? Absoutely nothing. The polls mean diddly-squat to us, the voter. Indeed, the stories these polls drive in the media do a lot more harm than good. They take our attention away from the information we’d use to take our own decision on the candidates and focus us on what other people are deciding. They subtly hint to us that there’s a bigger crowd going one way than is going the other and don’t we all like being in the bigger crowd?
What we also lack from the polls is a sense of context. That’s not necessarily the fault of the polls themselves. You have to have informed reporting to bring the context, but who can blame a media outlet that’s already a bit strapped for staff and cash like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, or Washington Post, for not having someone look over the last few polls to see if they show a trend? I mean, it’s not like the MSM is wasting precious journalist resources by sending people to Alaska to root through the Governor’s garbage or dig up a story about how she bought a used tanning bed, or anything as ridiculous as all that, right?
It’s one thing to see a poll that shows Barack Obama ahead by two points. It’s quite another to see a story that shows how he’s up by two points today but two days ago he was up by five and a week ago it was seven and last month it was ten. That might tend to show people that the crowd is shifting more than a little bit. Context matters and the incredible number of polls out there, each with their own metrics and standards, aren’t helping us become better informed voters. They’re getting in our way.
Tags: 2008 Election, Barack Obama, Los Angeles Times, Media Bias, New York Times, Washington Post
If they spent half as much time giving real news, correcting errors & reporting facts as they do reporting on meaningless polls…wouldn’t it then be amazing to find out what the public really believes? I mean, if they know that a certain story is false, rather than poll people to ask them if they think X is true and then report that 60% believe X is true…wouldn’t it be smarter to devote the time to correcting the story? That’s what they’d do if the wanted people to know the truth & leave how they act on it up to the individual.