A partially knee-jerk reaction on the political scene.
Is political polling dead?
Short answer: probably not. Pollsters may expand their margins of error and modify their methods, but the allure of reducing policy questions to percentages of voters in favor or opposed is irresistible to a certain type of mind.
Long answer: I hope so, because this habit of reducing policy questions to percentages of voters in favor or opposed is destroying our nation.
Let us first establish a few basic facts. First, the United States is one of the largest and almost certainly the most ethnically, religiously, and ideologically diverse nation in the world. Second, for better or for worse we are predisposed by the structure of our democracy and 230 years of tradition to have 2 major political parties.
Since the object of each of the two parties is to acquire control of both houses of Congress and get a member of their party in the White House, and in order to do so they must win 218 regional (House), 51 state-wide (Senate), and 1 national (Presidency) contest on a regular basis, some sort of coalition must be cobbled together. Being the Farmers & Ranchers party may get you a nice chunk of senate seats out of the West, but that batch of states has minimal power in the Electoral Congress. So it is for every faction, such as the Urban Poor Party, the Coal Miners Party, the much obsessed over Soccer Mom Party, the not as dominant as they think Educated Suburbs Party, and so forth.
The ultimate goal is to build a coalition that is not only a majority, but also fairly coherent to minimize infighting within the party. A party that is cobbled together out of a group of factions with wildly different priorities is usually a party in trouble and unable to win power, or if in power, quickly loses power when their public squabbles reduce voter trust in their competence. This is more difficult than it looks. Most voters do not naturally find themselves on the same side of every issue as the party they support, and as former Speaker of the House John Boehner and current Speaker Nancy Pelosi could both attest, even the politicians themselves can have different priorities from the leadership
The two parties have throughout their history traded various factions and regions like baseball cards. The most (in)famous case is the states of the old Confederacy flipping from never voting for the party of Lincoln and Grant to becoming ruby Republican red in the 1970s after the Democratic Party led the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. For less charged examples, consider that the Democratic Party used to be the party of farmers from the agrarian ideals of Thomas Jefferson up to the early 20th Century populism of Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan, or the fact that the Keystone State of Pennsylvania was a regular keystone in the GOP’s electoral coalition for almost a century from Lincoln to Eisenhower, only going against the GOP in 1912, 1936, 1940, and 1944. (And in all 4 of those elections, a Roosevelt won PA).
The most recent example is the 2016 swap that saw a majority of blue-collar trade union Democrats flock to Donald Trump’s message, while some traditionally Republican voters in the finance and national security industries moved to the establishmentarian Hillary Clinton.
These swaps allow a party to bring a dissatisfied bloc from the other party into their fold. But why does the first party let them leave? Well, because the goal is coherence and unity, and a party cannot be all things to all people. You will frequently hear partisans boasting about building a permanent majority, but history shows that about the time they have a supermajority, they lose a bloc of voters. For instance, the 2016 Democratic Party calculated that they had more than enough voters and could afford to lose much of the white working-class vote… They calculated wrong.
Where does polling come into play, and why do I say it is destroying our nation?
Before polling was commonplace, a candidate for political office had to take a fairly broad tack both on the campaign trail and in office. He could not know exactly where the voters stood, and so had to focus on general ideas. Once in office, he had to use his own judgement and the odd letter from a constituent to decide how to vote, and then to be able to defend his decisions come re-election time. Such a system favored leaders of common sense and courage, who could convince others of the rightness of a course of action. Such leaders typically win by large margins, because even people who disagree with them on some issues recognize their overall fitness for the duties of public office.
But now, one can commission a series of polls to slice and dice the electorate any way you like and determine that Issue A is opposed by 65% of people, but most of those wouldn’t vote for you anyway. Therefore, since there is also a rabid 20% in your own party that might support a primary challenger to you if you take the majority view, better to support the minority side. It’s a strategy of optimization: find a way to get enough support to get across the finish line while keeping the coalition as small and coherent as possible, and if you are sure to turn out enough of your voters to get to 51%, who cares about the 49%? This plainly happened to the Clinton campaign in 2016, where the white working class vote was no longer seen as a vital part of their coalition.
This strategy is ideal for propping up weak candidates lacking natural campaigning ability and/or deeply held views of their own. If the polls are right, you will always know just how many votes you need to get across the finish line, and can keep your 51% motivated with negative ads while accomplishing little. There is no need for bipartisanship or compromise in such a system. It also means that many elections will be narrow, bitter, and leave the winner with no clear mandate for how to govern.
Most crucially, such a system is reactive to voter opinions, rather than proactive in inspiring necessary actions and reforms. It does not aim to appeal to the better angels of our nature, but rather to play on the fears of a carefully targeted audience. In the process of slicing and dicing the public on paper, they are also sliced, diced, and set at each other’s throats in reality.
It appears to me from the past few election cycles that this optimization is becoming mainstream on both sides, and the mindset is being internalized by the candidates. Consider how both Mitt Romney in 2012 and Hillary Clinton is 2016 were caught on camera verbally writing off large swaths of the electorate as unreachable. The Donald Trump 2020 strategy was clear from day 1: double down on the base, ignore everybody else.
But surely, you say, I cannot lay the blame for this on polling! Polls are merely one of many tools at a politician’s disposal, and can be used positively or negatively! There have always been conniving politicians with their fingers in the wind!
Yes, it is true that polls are a tool, and that there have always been connivers and scoundrels in public life. But we ought to judge innovations by their unintended as well as intended consequences. And the unintended consequence of data-driven politics is a world full of angry, divided people and leaders without the courage and ability to take bold action when bold action is required.
Also, polling is a crutch, at least the fence-straddlers of old needed to have some basic instinct about the way the world was going to stay in power, which is in itself a fairly useful tool for a leader, even a slimy one.
So we can only hope that political polling “shall go down, to the vile dust, from whence it sprung, unwept, unhonored, and unsung.”
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