As a young newspaperman, I was covering my first city council election and was slipped a secret poll taken by the candidate’s staff that indicated the boss would win by 2 percentage points.
With scoop in hand, I rushed to the city editor and told him the breaking news. He glanced at my copy, crunched into a ball and flung it in the waste basket.
“We don’t publish polls,” he said.
I blushed and gathered my nerves to ask why. Patiently, he explained his old newspaper experience to the cub reporter.
“They are self serving. The questions are slanted to prove a point. The methodology is primitive. Half the respondents answer what they think you want to hear, not what they believe.”
I’m paraphrasing, of course. He rambled on for several minutes proving his thesis. His point was only national polls, at that time Gallup, could be trusted but only for one second in a 24/7 news cycle.
Granted the years have passed and polling has become more of an exact science in methodology and statistical analyses. But the thrust of what my crusty old city editor decried still holds true today: Polls can prove any point one sets out to stake.
That is why when the Rasmussen Poll suggests strong opposition to the health reform act and some other reputable poll indicates more favorably and reason among the political demographics, I shrug. I take both results with a grain of salt, as the expression goes.
Polls at best are indicators in a specific point of time depending how the question is worded.
The fact that lazy politicians and lazier commentators use these polls to tout their argument in my mind is pure poppycock. Pointless, in fact.
As Dennis Miller used to say on his HBO show a decade ago:
“That’s my opinion. I could be wrong.”
Excuse me as I exit stage right and duck.
Jerry Remmers worked 26 years in the newspaper business. His last 23 years was with the Evening Tribune in San Diego where assignments included reporter, assistant city editor, county and politics editor.