Jonah Goldberg expresses his thoughts on why polls of public opinion on policies are irrelevant.
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"The people" are often wrong. And I don’t mean this solely in an ideological or partisan sense. I mean it in terms of cold, hard fact. According to the polls, “the people” are liars. Big, fat, honking liars. Just one example among many: John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960 with 49.7 percent of the vote. This is as close as we get to a historical fact. Indeed, that might overestimate things, since many believe Kennedy stole (i.e., invented) votes in Illinois and Texas. Yet, as Bob Dole might say, “whatever.” By 1963, 59 percent of Americans told pollsters they voted for him. And after JFK’s death, 65 percent claimed to have done so (much like the huge numbers of French who remembered fighting for the resistance only years after the war ended).
In other words, “the people” lied or honestly deluded themselves. Or at least 15 percent of them did. But we don’t know which 15 percent and we never will, just as we don’t know how many Americans lie, fudge, or mislead pollsters. We know a large number must, because pollsters are constantly asking “the people” about incredibly complex issues and “the people” almost always pretend to know what they think.
I’m sorry, I may not be smart enough to understand why Anchorman isn’t a classic of American cinema. But I do know a lot of really smart people, and when I ask them the same questions pollsters regularly ask (Should Israel trade land for peace? Is the war in Iraq going well? Is Social Security partial privatization a bad idea? Why is Charmed still on TV while Angel and Buffy were cancelled?) and I usually get six-part answers, festooned with ifs, ands, buts and on-the-other-hands. But “the people” always seem to have a fully formed opinion handy.
And this leaves out the fact that a big chunk of “the people” are grotesquely ignorant of their government and current events. And I’m not just referring to that running segment on The Tonight Show where Jay Leno asks people to figure out what Flag Day celebrates. Just this month, the ABA (hint: the lawyer thing, not the bunch with the red, white, and blue basketball), released a poll that found that 22 percent of Americans think the three branches of government are Republican, Democrat, and Independent. In 1991 another ABA survey found that one third of Americans didn’t know what the Bill of Rights is. In 1987, 45 percent of Americans thought Karl Marx’s dictum “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” was in the U.S. Constitution. In 1964 (!) only 38 percent of the American people knew the Soviet Union wasn’t in NATO.
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Unfortunately, the media has found that polls are a cheap and easy way to generate stories so they poll endlessly asking the indifferent and the ignorant their opinions on a vast array of issues. This is not news and I bet it wasn't what most of these journalists pictured themselves doing when they entered the profession. Scrap the polls and just report the news instead of using the polls as an endless hook for whatever story you want to write.
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