The next domino to fall should the concept of Polls. They aren’t real. It’s just manipulation of gullible people. Polling is a form of advertising.
Amen. And never more so than in the age of caller ID, caller blacklists and the general necessity of having to block out calls from telemarketers including ‘surveys’ that are merely an attempt to skirt the law.
Polls are sixty questions long in many cases. They take 15-20 minutes to respond to. The pollsters (selling their snake oil) would have us believe that every response to every question was valid, the result of thought and/or strong sentiment and/or familiarity with the issues/candidates, etc.
Poll respondents often must disclose age, income, religious affiliation, sexuality, family size, occupation, education level, etc. The pollsters have some eg zip code and median income therein but must ask the rest. Anyone who reveals any of this, especially to a total stranger, is a fool.
Polls are doubly insidious because they are either treated as an infallible oracle by lazy writers of all parties and ideologies in DC or they are ignored if they fail to reinforce the writer’s biases. Michael Barone and Byron York are often regarded as GOP leaners but who are generally respected. However, they are as addicted to polls and the ‘bogus pipeline’ (as we said in psych classes) as anyone inside the Beltway. Reliance on polls is also an unspoken statement that these reporters/writers don’t REALLY care about what flyover country thinks; if they did, they’d be on a plane to ask in person.
Bottom line: anyone responding to a poll is either too foolish, lazy or bored to decline the poll. The sample is flawed, the questions are flawed, the responses are flawed. And that’s BEFORE the pollsters put their thumb on the scale and ‘weight’ the poll.