Polls and More Polls

                                             

    
                                                 By Florida Bill   

                           Want to know who is ahead, who is behind, who is surging and who made an intentional or unwitting boo-boo in the political maneuvering to become President next November. Want to know how Americans feel at any given moment about all aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic and whether endless testing for the virus is helpful or producing needless anxiety.  Will the drug,  hydroxychloroquine help, or hinder?                       
                   Turn on television for the the answers as new polls seemingly roll out at an incredible rate from the hundreds, maybe thousands of pollsters in the country. They have the crystal balls and are delivering the answers big time, all culled from telephone interviews.
                   You might wonder, who is being asked what, and where was the poll conduced. As a general rule, no one is told of the questions, or how many persons were interviewed; or where the  poll has been conducted, and how many persons have been interviewed. No one wants to get in the way of the fun so you get the findings and that's it. The collective opinion of others is all you need to know.                   
                  My own personal experience with polls did not arouse any admiration-- quite the opposite, in fact.  I was queried once by a telephone voice on a polling mission, but the caller spoke such poor English that declaring whether I was more likely, most likely, less likely or least likely to do this, that or the other thing was too tedious and I just hung up.   
                   How accurate are these telephone shotgun polls?   I heard one today that said that Joe Biden was leading the incumbent President by 11 percentage points, and another that on the pandemic, Biden is to be trusted, but for the economy, it's all Trump.  Another found that the President should not be taking the drug, hydroxychloroquine, because of possible side effects and that it sends the wrong message.
                   Now pay attention--masterminds behind the fine art of polling say that surveys tap into the into the heads of  a "scientifically constituted" group of  maybe 400 to 1,000 persons, and that this selected sample mirrors the larger population in every important way.  Supposedly, I've been told, samples have 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. That's the story and they're sticking to it, and if you buy it, well I've got this bridge to sell.

                          As if polling work is not 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. Contentions of accuracy strains the imagination.  It's  even more remarkable, considering that the United States has some 330 million persons living in 19,000 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.    
                          The pollsters, and there too many to count, guide their employees as they sit around a table with a bank of telephones, making calls and recording answers by checking boxes.  The bosses then pull the data together into a press release with the latest findings which is then delivered in one way or another to TV talkers who zip it out for public  consumption.   
                            Accurate--who knows.  A few years back, virtually every pollster alive, had Hillary Clinton creaming her opponent Donald Trump in the 2016 election--but, hey Trump won.  How did that happen?  Sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump and with an assist from the electoral college he became the nation's 45th President.  An embarrassed Gallop, one of the big names in polling, got even with a finding a few months later that Mrs. Clinton, sometimes called "Crooked Hillary" was America's most admired woman. 
                            Some polls are commissioned and one way or another pollsters make a ton of money.  If you are "hopeful" for a certain finding, you hire a pollster and he aims the questions at the areas most likely to produce the desired finding. For example, if you want to know Joe Biden is doing, check with the Harlem area of New York and you see that Biden is way ahead. If you want a reading as to how the incumbent Trump is doing, direct your telephone calls to the voters in West Virginia. 
                            Polls gin up interest in elections and in controversies and keep the pundits talking and talking and talking, and building their bankrolls and driving Bentleys. But as the sages say, "the only poll that counts is the one on election day." 

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