The Crystal Ball of Polling

  By Florida Bill    

                                     Every day in the frantic weeks and months before a Presidential election, candidates are spending millions of dollars disseminating their messages. The pollsters are going non-stop too, basking in the economic benefits from the fruits of the commotion. One poll puts a candidate way up and another has that same candidate losing. Five polls from a single state might all be significantly different.   
                                      All of this questionable yakking about plus and minus three percentage points and who is surging and who is behind is being reported in polls and surveys which are communicated to the public. You have to wonder about it all, but then in a few weeks we will have the one poll which really matters: the election of the 45th President of the United States.  
                                      There are so many different pollsters with crystal balls that it is near impossible to list them all.  Among major ones firing out results almost daily are NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and FOX  from the TV tube; and singular or combo polls results from the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and from a host of smaller papers and organizations.  And then there are the trusted polling granddads like Gallup, Rasmussen, Bloomberg, Emerson, Landmark, Reuters, and Quinnipiac.     
                                           What would the pundits be saying if there were no polls?   We would have only the inner thoughts of great thinkers like anchors Anderson Cooper, Martha Raddatz, Matt Lauer, Bill O'Reilly, Wolf Blitzer and Chris Wallace, and on and on and on. Their predictions would be in line with their political preferences. With NBC and the New York Times, for example, you will hear assurances that Hillary Clinton has a commanding lead and Donald Trump, with his filthy mouth and predatory attitude, will be way behind and spiraling downward.  Fox News will remind its viewers that Clinton is the world's most corrupt politician in the history of presidential elections. 
                                       Polls, polls polls and more polls tell us the opinion of the nation, all accomplished in a few hours.  But just how accurate are they? Are some more accurate than others? And does it matter when you can aways rely on the poll which suits your greatest hopes and prayers? 
                                      We are told  that a public opinion poll taps into the heads of  a "scientifically constituted" group of  maybe 400 to 1,000 persons, and that this carefully selected sample must look and act like the larger population they come from in every important way.  The sample must have almost exactly the same proportions of men and women, blacks, whites and Hispanics; Democrats and Republicans and old and young people as in the entire population. This small sampling is supposedly accurate to within plus or minus three percentage points.  Wow, quite a  feat.

                                    As if that isn't hard enough, changes in technology are complicating the leg work for pollsters: landlines are giving way to mobile phones; and users on-the-go are less patient with long drawn out questionnaires. Without a doubt, the money saving robo-calls with their computerized voices annoy many people and prompt them to hang up.

                                   So scaring up answers from the scientific aggregate, is, I sense, no simple task.  It's  even more remarkable, considering that the United States has more than 330 million persons living in some 30,000 incorporated and unincorporated cities, towns and villages; and these communities are situated inside 3,141 counties within our 50 states.  And this entire profile is spread out over about 3 million square miles of land and water.  Ain't computers grand?                     

                                  But any geek will tell you there is an underlying principle in all this data crunching: garbage in, garbage out.  Pollsters draft the questions and wording makes a lot of difference in the responses. Questions in polls are seldom yes or no, but rather open-ended types with scripted choices and often they involve favorability, ranging from very high to terrible.   If you want the numbers to rise, fall or surge for a favored one,  you can provide a carefully worded pitch, and if you happen to match it to the right geographical area: presto, new findings and new leaders.  But of course, we all know that would never happen. Right.
                                 And you have to wonder how many people lie to pollsters, either just for the heck of it, or because they have an agenda?

                                 TV viewers and political groupies have an uncanny addiction to these polls which reveal the comparative popularity and percentages of candidates vying to become their party's nominee.  Updates from polls and surveys arrive with great regularity, "like every 15 minutes," said one candidate.

                                 Is Donald Trump leading or did he slip a bit?  What about his taped remarks of 11 years ago in which he spoke of kissing and groping women taken by his celebrity.  The New York Times says that he groped women 30 years ago. Very "offensive stuff."  Trump denies it all but the pollsters' crystal ball is still at work on the response.  And Hillary Clinton.  Does anyone like her at all? 
                                 Is she as big a crook as Trump says she is.  Did she send out classified emails like they were chit chat about her garden or about taking yoga lessons. Should she be in jail for her criminal behavior?  The pollsters have all the answers and they measure the preferences of more than 330 million persons with a sample of a few hundred, taken from who knows where. And of course, the findings you hear about are consistent with the political preferences of the station or newspaper making the announcement. 
                                 Trump or Clinton, who will you vote for?  Let's see how it all plays out, but a little polling skepticism at this juncture is quite legitimate.  

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