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Are We Ever Going To Talk About Bad Polls?
Polling is officially unreliable. Are pollsters really just getting it wrong (every time) or is it a disinformation campaign?
Polls don’t just fall out the sky. They don’t grow on trees. The don’t spring up fully formed from the earth.
All polls come from somewhere.
Someone, most often a group of someones, will requisition a poll on a certain topic or topics, hire the requisite staff or polling company, set the parameters of the project and get to work. Maybe they want to take the public’s temperature on a number of social and policy questions for the purposes of a political campaign; maybe they want to measure the saturation of an ad campaign.
Pollsters and the people who hire them don’t do their work purely as a service to humanity; they do it for a purpose, usually, at the bottom of everything, that purpose is money.
Political campaigns, like ad campaigns, are very expensive. Pushing a message that falls flat with likely voters doesn’t make for a successful campaign. Losing campaigns, as many politicians have learned to their great cost, are just as expensive as winning ones, sometimes more. It makes sense to find out how voters feel and tailor messages that appeal to them.