The new Yorker: Are Polls Ruining Democracy?

[Fawke Em]

Even if more people could be persuaded to answer the phone, polling would still be teetering on the edge of disaster. More than forty per cent of America’s adults no longer have landlines, and the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act bans autodialling to cell phones. (The law applies both to public-opinion polling, a billion-dollar-a-year industry, and to market research, a twenty-billion-dollar-a-year industry.) This summer, Gallup Inc agreed to pay twelve million dollars to settle a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of everyone in the United States who, between 2009 and 2013, received an unbidden cell-phone call from the company seeking an opinion about politics. (Gallup denies any wrongdoing.) In June, the F.C.C. issued a ruling reaffirming and strengthening the prohibition on random autodialling to cell phones. During congressional hearings, Greg Walden, a Republican from Oregon, who is the chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, asked F.C.C. chairman Tom Wheeler if the ruling meant that pollsters would go “the way of blacksmiths.” “Well,” he said, “they have been, right?”

Internet pollsters have not replaced them. Using methods designed for knocking on doors to measure public opinion on the Internet is like trying to shoe a horse with your operating system. Internet pollsters can’t call you; they have to wait for you to come to them. Not everyone uses the Internet, and, at the moment, the people who do, and who complete online surveys, are younger and leftier than people who don’t, while people who have landlines, and who answer the phone, are older and more conservative than people who don’t. Some pollsters, both here and around the world, rely on a combination of telephone and Internet polling; the trick is to figure out just the right mix. So far, it isn’t working. In Israel this March, polls failed to predict Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory. In May in the U.K., every major national poll failed to forecast the Conservative Party’s win.

“It’s a little crazy to me that people are still using the same tools that were used in the nineteen-thirties,” Dan Wagner told me when I asked him about the future of polling. Wagner was the chief analytics officer on the 2012 Obama campaign and is the C.E.O. of Civis Analytics, a data-science technology and advisory firm. Companies like Civis have been collecting information about you and people like you in order to measure public opinion and, among other things, forecast elections by building predictive models and running simulations to determine what issues you and people like you care about, what kind of candidate you’d give money to, and, if you’re likely to turn out on Election Day, how you’ll vote. They might call you, but they don’t need to.

Still, data science can’t solve the biggest problem with polling, because that problem is neither methodological nor technological. It’s political. Pollsters rose to prominence by claiming that measuring public opinion is good for democracy. But what if it’s bad?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/politics-and-the-new-machine

So... how about those polls?

[Cassiopeia]

1. The only polls that matter

come on election day.

I think there will be some very vocal people here will be very surprised come April.

[Ed Suspicious]

2. I often feel that a well polling candidate helps to perpetuate a well polling candidate. Can you

imagine what this primary race might look like absent polling? I know we are often beaten over the head, day after day, with polls in an effort to demoralize us thereby weakening support for our candidate. I think without polls we might actually learn where a politician stands on the issues and we might actually have a very different race.

[jkbRN]

3. Whenever I see the polls or something in the MSM, I think of this article

http://chomsky.info/19670223/

[alcina]

4. I can answer that

Yes!

[femmedem]

5. Polls drive media coverage, donations, and the thought that you're throwing your vote away

if you're voting for someone who isn't polling well. They depress voter turnout, because you might think your candidate doesn't need you, or that your candidate doesn't have a chance whether you vote or not.

And imagine if all the media stories about polls were replaced by stories delineating the different policies and records of the candidates.

[Scuba]

6. Many (most?) polls are designed to influence opinion, not measure it.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

9. That's how I'd be doing it. Push polls all the way, baby! ;)

Ask people how they lean to start, then give them a series of statements by a candidate, then ask them whether they'd be more or less likely to vote for a candidate based on those, then tell them who said those statements. I think Bernie's got an incredible number of such good statements to pick from. Heck, his twitter feed is full of them. Unless they're political junkies, they probably won't have already heard most of them, so it's a quick way to essentially read a pamphlet to people who might have otherwise simply pitched it if you'd just handed it out to them on the streetcorner.

[Enthusiast]

10. Yooj Plus One!

[Demeter]

7. Only the Lying is ruining democracy

If the polls are lies, then yes.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

8. If we take the article at face value,

the takeaway is going to be that on voting day, the result is going to be less old and conservative and younger and more 'lefty' than telephone polling suggested.

This is a two edged sword - it leaves those 'bandwagon' people more likely to vote for the more conservative candidate, but at the same time suggests that the more lefty candidate will outperform polling.

[Fawke Em]

11. That just happened in Canada and England...

so it's not without precedent.