ARE POLLS TRUSTWORTHY?

...And if not, who or what can you trust? (Gullible Christian Alert: this is what we would call a rhetorical question.)

Here is an interesting evaluation of polling and what it means. It is entitled The Left's Big Blunder.

A quip:

In 2008 there is no silent majority: there is the silenced majority. The unpolled majority. The media is so pro-Obama that the views and the concerns of McCain supporters are for the most part ignored or, at best, mocked. The goal is to foster disillusionment among them, a sense of isolation. To trick the Republicans into all staying home on election day because "there's no hope of winning." Maybe the Democrats can't avoid a showdown on November 4, but if they can convince enough McCain supporters to individually "fold" and not vote at all, then Obama can carry the day.

Of course, you can't trust polls. And yet politicians rule by them, true believers hang on those precious numbers, opinions are swayed by them, and elections are won by them. The USA Today newspaper got its start by putting a poll on its front page every day (I haven't read a USA Today for years, so don't know if this is still a practice). It got so Doonesbury ran a series entitled, "We're eating more prunes!" as a parody of the sorts of silly polls that paper would run. Of course, poll-following tends to be a self-fulfilling sort of activity, and we are now a nation of poll followers. It is soft-porn gambling: a low-grade thrill ride for a nation of people who just "like to watch", a la Chauncey Gardner.

End of rant.


HT to Bi-Coloured Python.



POST SCRIPT: A nice followup to the article linked here can be found here.