"Opinion polls are the narcotic of choice for the politically active part of the American electorate. Like all narcotics, polls have their uses: they sometimes allow us to function better as political practitioners or even as dreamers, and don't forget that fabulous rush of exhilaration when our candidate shows dramatic gains. But polls are an addiction that also distort our political feelings and actions even as they trivialize political campaigns -- and they allow our political and media suppliers to manipulate us ruthlessly. The negatives, as pollsters might say, outweigh the positives."
from The Opiate of the Electorate By Michael Schwartz
Tomgram: a project of the Nation Institute
Schwartz on polling as a political narcotic
[...]
This incident came to mind yesterday while I was reading former pollster Michael Schwartz's discussion below of our societal poll addiction. I've certainly become one of those addicts. Remembering my own shaky grasp of the most basic astronomical facts, I had to suppress the urge to laugh at all of us "political junkies" for our increasing devotion to an election process underpinned by mathematical methodologies so abstruse (not to say questionable) that few of us would likely grasp them. This is but another version of faith-based politics, as Schwartz makes clear. The very idea that, in a term Jonathan Schell first used sometime in the 1990s, we would conduct -- via our media (which loves the continual "horserace" of politics) -- an endless "serial election" based on the mathematical manipulation by various private polling companies and media outfits of the opinions of relatively small numbers of possible or potential or registered voters seems, on further thought, absurd and undemocratic, not to say, as Schwartz indicates, dangerous.
For the anti-Bush camp in particular, a poll-based politics (despite the present "bounce" for Kerry) offers special dangers this year. After all, a whole series of possibly unprecedented voter mobilizations seem to be taking place in swing states across the country. There are evidently significant upsurges in minority registration and new voter registration generally, especially in urban Democratic areas. I've personally never known so many -- perhaps any -- friends and acquaintances who headed for swing states to register voters (sometimes just on a weekend off) or are planning to head for swing states (New York, where I live, being more or less a presidential non-event) to help ensure Election Day turn-out elsewhere.
Readers write me regularly at the Tomdispatch website of such efforts, as one California resident did recently, telling me that she and her friends were hoping to contact 1,500 voters in Nevada by cell phone over several days. By the way, youthful cell-phone parties, utilizing all those free late night and weekend hours and organized around calls into swing states, have hardly made it into the political news and yet they too may be significant -- just as the cell phones of the young haven't yet made it into political phone polling, another way in which what's measured by our pollsters may be less than real. Polls can't measure all sorts of things and yet trusting the polls is almost an item of faith by now. What the constant polling does, though, is to continue the transformation of our political system -- once so sturdy --into a strange house of cards.
[...]
continued http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1881
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