I’m sick and f**cking tired of hearing nightly news spew out phrases like; “people are doing this”, “people think that”, and “our poll results show this”. And as if that does not bother me enough, they add insult to injury to it when they say it with such arrogant authority with an annoying smile wiped across their newscaster face, implying that this useless information actually means anything to the general public. Every time I hear extremely complex or divisive topics boiled down into a “poll” with some fancy number attached to it, I say to myself, “Wait a minute, I’ve never been polled”. Not only have I never been polled, but I cannot think of anyone I even know who has been polled. So the question is… WHO THE HELL are they talking about? I know people are obviously giving their opinion, but who?
How many people out there are taking part in these “polls” and “surveys” that supposedly take the official pulse of our Nation? Is it even half of the population? I think not. I mean, does it include people all across many various backgrounds, religions, classes, creeds, etc. Or is it statistics from a crowd of people waiting in line for the next Ben Affleck film? And where does this “poll” data and statistics come from. Who says that the question even makes sense in the first place? Oh great, just because you showed me an official survey statistic with a toll free number on it, I’m supposed to accept that the final tally of opinions means something? What are they smoking and what are we smoking to put up with this nonsense? I can’t believe we are so ignorant that we repeat phrases like; “Americans think this”, or “Americans vote like that”, and”Americans do this”. What America? Who are you even talking about? You sure as hell don’t speak for me and I’m willing to bet that you don’t speak for the majority of people out there who have more important things to do than take polls all day.
In addition to the idiocy of giving weight to a poll in the first place, I wonder why everything is always viewed as so black and white with the questions. For example, every time they run a poll asking; “Democrat or Republican”, they forget the many people out there (including me), who think that both parties are equally useless. And thanks for the two choices for a political party by the way, it’s great to have one more choice than with communism. (ha-ha)
The question I hate the most is definitely the; “Is America Ready for a Female or Minority President” question. This one is perfect for polls, because it incorporates all the ignorance into one question, but with a strong dose of agenda along with it. Think about it for a moment, they are asking you (one person), to speak for an entire country of over 300 million people. Now the truth is that this question can and is only aimed at you! How can you speak for millions of people that you don’t know? And why would you? But regardless of the answer, the question has absolutely no point to it in the first place, except to keep people divided and thinking inside of the routine box.
A well crafted poll will always keep us thinking that we have only choices A and choices B, so that we forget not only the other choices we have, but the will to make any meaningful choices in our lives.
In my humble opinion, I say that we focus on the questions that can actually be answered. For starters, “do I take care of my kids”? How about “Am I making good choices in life”, or “am I making positive changes in this world”. These are just a few “poll” questions to consider asking yourself, but if you are not ready yet, you can always keep buying tickets to the media circus.
-From the mind of the egoassassin
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April 2, 2008 at 11:30 am |
I agree that the weight given to poll data is misguided at best, and is used for manipulation of public sentiment at worst. I also agree that they distort the question and the results by confining the number of potential responses. Also, you make a good point about how the question is phrased, and I personally give virtually no weight to news reports on polls that do not make available the EXACT wording of the question(s). This is more of a problem for issue polls rather than candidate polls which are usually one or the other or none. Issue polls on the other hand simply are not in-depth enough to fully address the gray ares; I once read a poll question on abortion with four positions ranging from ‘always ok’ to ‘never ok’ and I would never have agreed to answer the question, as all 4 included wording that directly contradict my own beliefs on the subject.
That said, it is not at all unlikely that you would go your entire life without responding to Zogby, Reuters, AP or other political pollsters OR to the monthly CPI survey conducted by the government. The normal sample size for most nation-wide polls is between 1,000 and 1,200 people. This gives you a conservative margin of error (1 divided by the square root of the sample size) of around 3%. The sample size may seem ludicrously small for a potential voting base of 200,000,000, but as you can see by the equation for the margin of error, the improvement in accuracy improves by smaller and smaller margins with the inclusion of each new participant. So, a sample size 10X larger would, in most cases only cut the error by about 2/3 or 2%. One thing you should bear in mind though with those phone polls is that they are still entirely based on land lines. This skews the results to overrepresent old people and people in rural ares (both groups that tend to lean right) and underrepresent young, urban respondents (both traits that correlate with left-leaning beliefs).
I actually have been politically polled, though only once compared with maybe 5 private surveys.
April 2, 2008 at 2:58 pm |
I was polled yesterday – and they called my cell number, which I thought was interesting. They mostly asked questions about one candidate – so I just did my best to give the most negative answers possible. Those responses probably made more of a difference than I ever have by voting…