What’s Wrong with Polls

by Micah Tillman

As the primaries gather steam I’ve found myself paying a disturbing amount of attention to other people’s opinions. If a candidate has a “surge in the polls,” he gets almost as much press as if he had won a caucus or primary. And you can’t help but think that the former just might lead to the latter.

So I keep hoping my favorite candidates will go through such a surge. If nothing else it would make them look “viable,” and there a few things more consequential than that. It changes the “feel” of a candidate, and that feeling just might spread.

People become famous for being famous, after all, because it feels good to think about people other people think about. It makes you feel part of something larger than yourself. And now that I’ve discovered the RealClear Politics poll-average-charts, I can’t help checking them regularly to see whether the larger-than-myself movement I’m a part of is growing.

One thing you’ll notice if you look at the charts, however, is how many ups and downs the candidates have gone through. And it will also remind you of why we all hate polls so much. They prove just how fickle people are and make you wonder why we trust “the will of the people” at all.

Or perhaps it’s not that drastic. Perhaps you just wonder why people’s opinions on Election Day should determine the next two-to-four years’ leadership. It’s pretty clear from the graphs that they’re going to change their mind the next day (week, month). And with that, the “representative” in our “representative democracy” is gone.

So perhaps it is that drastic. Or perhaps it just shows you that — contrary to what we were taught in school — our representative democracy is not the principled way to make democracy work in a large society. Perhaps it’s the slight-of-hand way to open a stodgy structure like bureaucratic government to a little chaos — in hopes that change might actually happen when it’s needed.

And all this gets me wondering whether we really believe in democracy like we say we do. Imagine if “the polls” didn’t close on Election Day, but instead the “polling” companies continued to “poll” us every day. They seem to be perfectly capable of doing it in the run up to the election, why not year-round? Instead of paying politicians, we could pay pollsters to collect and tabulate our “vote” on whatever issues happened to be up for discussion on a given day.

That idea, of course, is revolting. But why?

Is it because pollster’s only sample a small part of the population? Only a small part of the population votes, so what’s the difference?

Is it that pollsters choose the people they will poll, rather than letting people decide for themselves whether they will vote? If the science of polling is as accurate as they present it (they can even tell us their margin of error! Try to get a politician to do that) what difference does it make? It’s not any given individual’s vote that matters, but the “will of the people.” Right?

Is it because different pollsters come to different results? Isn’t that why mathematicians invented averaging? Sum the results, divide by the number of addends. RealClear Politics does it already.

Or is it that we know the changeable nature of “the will of the people” would lead to a “government” that is against something in one week that it was for the week before? In other words, is it that nothing would get done?

In that case, we don’t believe in democracy after all. We believe in pragmatism. Forget the voice of the people, forget the rule of the people if it wouldn’t produce results. Or rather, “wouldn’t produce consistent results.” Or rather, “wouldn’t produce results we like.”

No wonder we don’t like polls, then. They bring up way too many unanswerable questions about what it is exactly that we’re doing here in this “American Experiment.”

And no wonder Fred Thompson has been having such a hard time. The more he harps on “principles” (he’s bet his entire campaign thereon, rather than focusing on “issues” like normal candidates) the more he reminds us that representatives don’t represent us. If they’re principled, at least, they represent what a little more than half the voting public (which is much less than half the public at large) wanted back on Election Day.

And we don’t want to think that our “democracy” is more a game, or a collective story we tell ourselves, than anything. Wasn’t it just the monarchies of the past, with their “Divine Right of Kings” that were based on myth? Isn’t it just the socialist dictatorships of the world that are based on the fable that rulers with absolute power aren’t corrupted absolutely, but want the best for everyone?

And isn’t this whole series of complications the reason why we libertarian types are what we are? Perhaps it’s not so much that we’re afraid of government having too much power. Perhaps we just don’t like lies — and that’s what all governments of whatever form seem to be.

But we’d rather swallow a little lie than the chaos that would be anarchism. And that kind of pragmatic compromise doesn’t bother us (too much) because we think there are more important things in life than politics.

We’re willing to compromise on unimportant things, in other words, if that means the really important things don’t get messed up.

Micah Tillman is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. His blog can be found at http://micahtillman.com/.