Concerns over the role of the poll are misguided
The high number of public opinion polls was impossible to miss during the 2008 election, and, though the horserace is on break, professional pollsters are keeping busy. Polling is no longer a part-time business, and a wide variety of opinion polls, covering everything from congressional and presidential job approval to health care reform and the economic crisis, lands daily on the desks of policymakers and in the spotlight of news reports.
This glut of polling data is causing some alarm. There is a view, most prevalent among members of the media, that increased polling is affecting the behavior of policymakers; polling is blamed for the stereotypical windsurfing politician, who alters his positions with each new set of numbers. Similarly, there is a worry that the media’s fixation on polls draws attention from real issues given that polls use tools that are admittedly imperfect. These concerns are not entirely misguided, but both overstate the importance of polling in American politics. While polls are a useful communication tool that can help craft effective rhetorical arguments, politicians rarely change their policy stances based on them. And, for the media, polls are quite simply a parlor trick that makes politics more entertaining and tangible for the public. Certainly public opinion polls cannot completely capture reality, but the media’s reporting on them also does little to distort it.
Polls as Entertainment
In a long meeting, most people will take frequent glances at their watch, and, even if they know it might be off by a few minutes, are relieved to have some way to measure their progress. The media’s obsession with polls serves largely the same function. Robert Blendon, director of Harvard’s Opinion Research Program and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, told the HPR that the media began using polls in the early 1930s as a means to provide more in-depth, quantifiable coverage of political races. “Newspapers that didn’t run polls,” Blendon said, “were less likely to maintain political readers. The reason why these polls exist is so that people would read the newspaper.” Soon, editors found that readers wanted polling data not just on political horse races, but also on the issues of the day. Since then, the media have willingly obliged the public’s desire to measure trends on any and all hot-button issues. However, just as checking one’s watch in a meeting does not change what time it will end, these polls do little to alter the political landscape.
The sheer number of polls suggests some will be exceptionally misleading and flat-out wrong. Ann Selzer, an Iowa pollster who works as a consultant for several major news outlets, told the HPR, “My job is to be sure [media outlets] are responsible with how they report on polls.” Indeed, not all polls are created equally, and Selzer filters the wheat from the chaff, examining the wording of the questions and the demographics of the sample in order to separate the reliable polls from the unreliable. “All the major media outlets,” Selzer continued, “have very credible people working for them doing the same thing.” No one pretends public opinion polls are an infallible measure of reality, but the mainstream media takes care to ensure the polls they do report reflect reality as much as possible.
That is not to say that an occasional misleading poll never finds its way onto the airwaves. Fox News recently released a poll that asked whether President Obama’s forcing out the CEO of General Motors constituted “a dangerous move towards socialism.” Such a leading question is not the norm; most reputable news outlets report only on only questions and polls with statistically sound sample groups. According to Selzer, biased and flawed polls are usually picked up only by independent, online journalists.
Polls as Communication
While politicians, just like media outlets, have an interest in polling data that accurately reflects public opinion, they rarely turn to it to determine their policies. Teresa Vilmain, a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a veteran of many campaigns including Hillary Clinton for President, told the HPR that politicians use polls for a variety of purposes. “Sometimes elected officials and candidates use polls to figure out how to talk about an issue so voters best understand,” she said. “Fundamentally, polls are not a means to shift policy stances.” By looking at polls in which the same basic question is asked in a variety of ways, politicians can develop the most effective framing for their pre-existing positions. For instance, one might notice that, according to a recent Gallup poll, 53 percent of the public favors “a new law” that would make it easier for workers to unionize, while, according to a Rasmussen poll, only 33 percent think “Congress should change the law” to achieve the same objective. A politician who supports making it easier for workers to unionize would then know to frame his or her position in terms of creating new legislation, rather than changing existing statutes. Politicians thus do not change their positions because of polls, only their ways of conveying those positions.
This is a strategy that has few substantive repercussions. As Blendon explained, “Even if a public opinion poll says Americans think we’re spending too much on foreign aid, [politicians] know that the vast majority of people don’t think very often about foreign aid.” Therefore, politicians might be more careful in how they describe foreign aid expenditures to their constituents, but few will convert this into a tangible policy change. Indeed, for only a handful of issues — those about which voters have very strong feelings and where there are many viable approaches — can public opinion polls cause a real shift in a politician’s position. Take, for instance, a tax on carbon emissions. The term “gas tax” is likely to elicit a highly negative response among voters, whereas the term “cap and trade” is met with general apathy. Many politicians, therefore, favor cap-and-trade regulations, and, though some economists harp on the virtues of a carbon tax, most agree the differences between the two proposals are small.
Polls in Perspective
The gas tax example is an exception to the rule: public opinion polls are generally only a sounding board for politicians’ arguments and ideas. In the communications age, politicians strive to learn more about their constituents, and polling data is one tool in their arsenal. Furthermore, while the media’s fixation on public opinion polls adds little to substantive political discussions, it is driven by the public’s own demand and, ultimately, does not have much effect on the decision-making of politicians. Polls are here to stay, and it’s nothing to be alarmed about.