Do Americans want a government by polling?

Most Americans trust the vote and elections more than the polls.

It is astounding that so many polls exist, and that so many can make money at doing polls. Obviously, many people desire to hear about polls, and many of them have an inherent trust in poll results. Many others don’t, and here’s why in English (vice statistics talk).

Polls suffer from human intervention, be it influence by the buyer, the creator, or suspicion by the readers of the polls that the creators had an agenda. Much can be said for “focus groups” and “studies” by the way.

A poll purist, or a poll idealist, truly does believe polls are a shortcut method to the latest situation report about whatever. This may be, but more likely it is maybe not. A purist will spend as much or more time on constructing the poll and its assumptions, and publishing them, than they will on the poll and publishing the results. The basic reason is human mistrust, some call it experience. Polls can be manipulated, especially given the news cycles, the election cycles, and some business cycles.

Some of us have gotten to where we won’t waste our time reading polls or the latest fatwa. Both are suspect to those who have only so much time to try figure out the “facts” and improve our situational awareness.

Yet news companies keep commissioning polls so they can report on them. Is trust in these polls and resulting headlines increasing or decreasing? Is this tried and true business method part of the decline of mainstream media? Many think so, and so these kinds of polls one can predict will decline and go away. After all, these types of polls and headlines are a recent phenomenon, and lacking an infusion of trusted professionalism, will go away.

Another group decidedly grounded in the polling past is our ruling political group of Americans, and their hired staffs and media and campaign managers. Their principles are simple and two. First is to run to the extremes to gain the nomination, and then run to the middle to win the general vote. Second is to control and frame the discussion so as to win the votes. Polling is an important tool in both principles, and so far seems to work. As always, past success breeds complacency and confidence that it will continue to work. But this one underlying tool of polling has reached its epoch, and will fade until some professionalism is introduced. Professionalism, by the way, means confidence in polls by the voting public.

Family run businesses are a good example of how polls should be constructed if to be used for business reasons, albeit balanced by Family considerations. Human intervention is so necessary in building trust in the poll results that most time used in a real poll is just that. Let the audience being asking the polled questions create the questions that should be asked, how asked, and in what order? Then, and only then, is there credibility in the poll results.

Absence all the time a real poll takes, no wonder we still have a Constitutional vote to find out what we really value, locally, state-wide, and federally.