Today’s post comes from 9th District Congressman Loomis Beechly, representing all the water surface area in the State of Minnesota.
Greetings, Constituents!
The first I want you to know about me is that I’m on your side – and that’s true no matter which side your side might be. I will always support the closely held opinions of We The People. And when I’m talking directly to you, I support the notions of You The Person.
Some hyper-critical pundits complain that this makes me inconsistent on the issues. Like that’s a bad thing. If I’m hard to pin down it’s because I’m consistently in favor of you, and you’re only human. But I want you to know you can rely on me anyway.
That’s why I’m not so sure we should celebrate the birthday today of famed opinion pollster George Gallup. Gallup was a decent enough fellow, I suppose, who thought prevailing public attitudes should be taken seriously in a democracy.
That’s good, I guess. But Gallup wanted to do scientific surveys to tabulate the opinions of large groups of people all at once, and I just want to deal with the notions of the person I’m talking to at the moment. That’s the way politics should be conducted, in my opinion – face to face. Whatever ridiculous thing you say, I’ll agree for as long as we’re together, no matter how pudding-headed it is.
When I go on to the next person, well, that’s a different matter.
So all this data telling us what vast numbers of people believe at any particular time is useless to me. Pollsters claim to be neutral, and nothing frustrates me more than neutrality, unless it’s fairness! The sad truth is, people’s responses can be guided by the way questions are asked, and outcomes can be determined by the selection of answers they’re allowed to give. You may think otherwise but we’re not standing next to each other right now, so I can afford to not pay any attention at all to what you think.
If I had my way, all public opinion polling would be illegal.
And so would fact-checking.
Your Congressman,
Loomis Beechly
Trail Baboon 
I say disnored and igsputed..
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Morning all. I am still hailing from Central America… after a 3-hour delay in the airport yesterday afternoon, they finally cancelled our flight so clients and I ended up at the Airport Hilton in Liberia. Hopefully will get home today. Obviously no one polled any of us at the airport gate yesterday to see if we were interested in staying another night here. I’m sure any and all polling info would have been nasty… based on observing some other folks’ reactions to the situation.
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I give up – who is this?
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I think it is Boy George and the Culture Club.
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Culture Club with Boy George.
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correct karma chameleon is the song. im no holly thats for sure
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i think polling is the root of all evil. the fact that opinions are like bellybuttons and everybody has one is a given and to try to use the information on popular opinion to mold your presentation is an understandable notion if you are a breakfast cereal but not a leader of the democracy. our leaders should be able to say what they stand for and allow us to vote based on who they are. instead they try to make certain they offend no one and stand for everything good and against all objectionable possibilities. i live in a republican part of the world but obama won twice so eric paulson my new state congressman has been working very hard at mastering the art of talking at length and having nothing come out. great strides toward job creation medical device tax breaks and overall better living conditions for his daughters who lead all ads and commercials he presents. i dont believe the new breed of politician who flutter in the wind and change like a chameleon and have the spine of a jellyfish will do anything but reflect the polls. maybe instead of a politician we can just have polls. we dont need a person playing go between if that is their role we can do that now with a facebook poll and just email it in form outr smart phone. maybe we could choose our smart phone company by political leaning. they could send out polls on every little thing and make the government jump through hoops in order to keep us from changing phone companies.
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Good morning. Actually, I had a conversation about polls yesterday and I defended their use. Out of the choices that we are voting on, I choose mocked. Beechly is a man of the times. Polls are of no use to him and apparently of no use to many other politicians. They seem to be thought of as a joke. Why should we care what people think? Ho! Ho! Ho!
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The problem with polls is that too many people are influenced by a herd mentality and are easily swayed by whatever the majority opinion is of the poll (gosh Martha – 62% of people think we should eat more ferret flavored snacks…do we have any ferret flavored snacks?…). Once you start seeing polls about who is a “front runner” in a political race, it gets harder for the race to be about what a person believes in and stands for and more about a popularity contest. Bah.
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Like so many other things, polls can be instructive or silly, informative or deceptive. Like so many people, they can encourage us to do the right thing or irritate us and make us despondent. Badly worded polls have often been used to mislead and control people, but good polls help good leaders connect with voters. Early political polls are a waste of time; ask President Giuliani! MN polls encouraged me to think it was possible to win the vote for gay marriage in MN.
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I tend to be rather cynical about opinion polls. Oftentimes questions are poorly worded or don’t give an option that represents how I feel about something. Where is the “none of the above” option when I need it?
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It’s hard to believe that a poll, especially a phone poll, could be accurate, since the sample group would be “people who still have a land line but don’t have caller ID.” It reminds me of the polls that predicted Dewey over Truman.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been inundated with polling and survey opportunities in recent years. Online news outlets regularly include some sort of fatuous survey box. I suspect they tell themselves it’s a way of engaging readers. It seems as if every checkout in every major retailer wants you to go online and take a survey. They really just want your email address.
Of course, most of those surveys and polls are “push polls”. They aren’t interested in your opinion except to the extent they can influence it. Somewhere along the way, marketers hit upon the device of surveying as a form of stealth promotion and it’s gotten transparently absurd.
When the rare survey gets through my barriers, I usually ask them what they pay. If my opinion has monetary value, that value ought to go to me.
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I got some polling calls on my cell phone. I assume they must get the number from my health insurance. (Did I put down my cell number? I resist doing so.) The calls come to the cell phone and start with an explanation of polling seniors about health issues on their cell phones. The person says it is a legitimate health survey for the University of MN (except the calls originate in Indiana). I do not do surveys, but ones like this I usually listen to the opening, then refuse. It’s one of those where I am on the list to be called. I hang up but they just call back the next day. After the fourth call I demanded they stop, got the argument that they needed me to answer, but I insisted. They stopped.
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Jimmy Stewart and Jane Wyman have an underappreciated movie called “Magic Town.” Stewart is a pollster who finds a town that is a perfect US Demographic. 1947. An early ans interesting comment on polling. Wonder if it is on Netflix, which I do not have, but have been considering getting.
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if you dial either 2 or 9 they take you off their call list.
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You’re one tough customer, Bill, aren’t ya? I’ll give you a nickel for your thoughts.
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You’d be due some change.
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Snort!
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The point is that there are so many faux surveys out there that it’s no longer possible to trust the intent of the surveyor and, I suspect, no longer possible to get a true representative sample of respondents. Surveys as a device have been corrupted to irrelevance.
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exactly like politicians
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Way off topic.
I did not take a poll on this, but you can vote NO by just not going there:
If you want to see some of my Seattle pastels, you can go to my seldom-used blog
http://birchwoodhill.wordpress.com/
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Those are great,Clyde. I especially like the clouds across the water.
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Speaking as someone who gives psychological tests, it is hard enought to assess enduring personality characteristics, much less more transient opinions in a fluid political environment.
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Polls aren’t all that useful in many cases. I do hope the major newspapers and polling organizations keep at it, though. It helps keep the system honest. One thing that prevents evildoers from trying to hijack the system through some kind of high-tech fixing of the vote is that if the results of an election differed significantly from what the polls said it would be, there would be a lot of snooping to find out where the discrepancy was. If we didn’t have polls, we’d probably already have a completely rigged vote and we wouldn’t have any way of knowing it.
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