Polling, Schmolling: Biggest News Not Hillary NH: But Seduction of Major Pundits/ Newsmen by Polls

It’s not stunning that Hillary won New Hampshire. What is stunning is the gullibility of the press and pundits following corporate polls that were as off as Roseanne singing the Star Spangled Banner on the baseball diamond.

After Iowa too many pollsters leaned out of their windows like old Mrs. Goldberg gossiping, calling out that the funeral dirge was playing for Senator Clinton. But even if so, which it wasn’t, tonight it’s clear, the Senator’s first, middle and last name may well be Lazarus. And some of the most venerable of the newscasters were taken in by the ‘public polls,’ as they called them.

I used to have a fantasy about pollsters too. When I was a kid, I imagined pollsters chose ‘informants’ with fancy names at random, out of the phone book…. like, Mr. Heathcliff Cunningham… but suspected many informants may have looked, in reality… more like characters from Mad magazine: blobby strappy-Tshirt, sitting in chairs that looked like enormous decayed mushrooms, three-day beard stubble, a mountain of empty crushed beer cans … and that was just the women…

Whoever the informants were, they had lots of opinions. Informed or ill-informed didn’t matter, male, female nuances were not graded in polls. What mattered: The stats in aggregate and by gender, socio-economic status, education, religion were ‘the get’ for my imaginary pollster…. amassing numbers. For money.

But, we all have to wake up from favored, or even hand-me-down fantasies, if we are to know the best, but also the worst, of human nature.

Now, these many years later, throughout 38 years as a practicing psychoanalyst, I know polling is a science. Or ought to be. But is the modern corporate business called polling, always free of what in psychology is called, “researcher’s bias?”

… that is, whomsoever pays for, whomsoever has interest in one side or the other of outcome… and who without blind study design or control groups, or an ironclad design, will not only influence, but skew, the numbers toward the researcher’s known or unconscious personal agenda(s)?

So many corporate polls. And tonight in New Hampshire, so many of the polls off the mark… the pundits stating and repeating the poll ‘data’, were misled all the way from a bit, to a huge amount. “Barack’s going to slam-dunk Hillary in New Hampshire” being only one of quite a few “stats” that tanked. Utterly. Embarrassingly so. It’s not that mistakes were made; everyone makes errors. It’s that polling as a science depends on ‘near accuracy,’ not a miss as far as Texas is from China.

Since pollster corporations, invited or not, have become part of the electoral process, given ‘the corporate benediction’ by many broadcasters, … I notice quite a few newscasters freed from having to read from the boring teleprompter, but instead, now sometimes act as though they’re ‘in the box with Cosell,” crying out the plays as they see ‘em, and drawing most of all on the numbers from polls that are simply handed to them, and not questioned.

Unfortunately, then, the news becomes not issues, not candidates, not investigative reports, not face to face interviews of substance, but hours and hours of a quasi exciting game (for the pundits and broadcasters only) of down-on-knees, back alley craps… with one pundit tonight literally yelling as though at ringside, (not Seven-come-eleven-Baby-needs-new-shoes, haaaaa… but) …. “The Clinton Obama upset… It’s as big as Ali/ Foreman!!!”

Spin is better done with floss rather than facts. However, tonight, when pundits and newscasters found themselves ‘wrong’ because they took the polls’ skew to heart, many touted Senator Clinton’s win as ‘a STUNNING upset,’ an ENORMOUS stunner’ and other purple sports’ prosaia… when in fact, Senator Clinton’s win in NH is perhaps only stunning to some of them who relied on polls too deeply. For a minute there, as developed as I think Chris Matthews and Tim Russert (who I know from adult literacy events in NY) often are in insight rather than braggadoccio, I thought I was watching a Saturday Night Live skit as each one outdid the other in grandiose sports metaphors turn after turn.

Since corporate poll incursions… news investigations of insight, and handmade interviews of citizens, have too often devolved to fastfood poll-chasing. So, ought we not know much more about how polls are actually done, who pays for each one broadcast and bandied about, which other corporations, organizations are fronting the money, who stands behind whom anonymously, who is related to whom under the table, who designed the poll and what their cred really is? And how the polls are vetted by the news agencies they are fed to?

I’d say that somewhere in the woodpile of polling are utterly honest pollsters who are adept at what they do. But because of lack of oversight of this clear corporate influence into the public and populist realm of elections, I also deeply sense there is a scandal brewing somewhere in the polling industry that will stun all of us when it surfaces. “Follow the money, and especially, Follow the money behind the money,” would be my best head’s up.

If polls are science, and not nuanced manipulation; there ought be clear design to the poll, clear names as to who purchased the poll and why, and clear notes that leave a paper trail for some kind of cross-check of the results, and an aging process for the timeline regarding shifting emphasis amongst those who were polled yesterday vs. how they ‘drifted’ today, given new information or by being persuaded. And more.

Pollsters worth their salt ought be forthcoming with answers about all these matters. Stat is not a proprietary secret.

And next time around, perhaps with some sunlight from the public, there will be more accuracy in what pollsters are measuring and most of all, who brings them forward, and how they interpret those results to make predictions, and who takes the data without inquiry and cross-checks.

Polling is supposed to be scientific and clinical and replicate-able in its timeframe, not wild-eyed white hair flying prophesies from corporate mountainsides… or molehills….