No one knew what was coming. We get that. The election of 2016 was a failure of polling, a failure of the science of prediction and a failure of punditry.
But my question is: When should we have known who was ahead in the polls? In June? In August? In October? The day before the election? Why should we want to know?
Every day, it seemed that a dozen highly expert and reputable polling enterprises conducted polls of young voters, old voters, black voters, white voters, Hispanic voters, Muslim voters, evangelical voters, voters in every region, male voters, female voters, likely voters, college-educated voters, high-school-educated voters and nearly every imaginable permutation of groupings and subgroupings of individuals who collectively compose the polity. But why?
The winner of the election is determined by the election, as we now have seen. Why do the media – and perhaps the public – want to know who is “ahead” days, weeks and months before the voting?
There are reasons, of course, but only bad ones. The reasons are bad, and polling is bad, because they obscure why voting is done in the first place.
Polling is part of the news/electoral/entertainment industry. It turns elections into sporting events in which the inning by inning, quarter by quarter results are always of interest and importance. Who is ahead? By how much? Is there time for the other team to come back.
Constant polling information provides that form of entertainment. It seems to be a way to keep ratings high for the ongoing show, “Election: Name Your Year.”
Political parties and candidates feel they need polling for tactical reasons. Are they getting the right “message” to the right demographic segments? If they are falling behind, they need to refocus and rebrand. Polling, for the parties and candidates, is nothing more than market research.
What is lost in this relentless emphasis on polls as forms of entertainment and marketing? The status of elections as vehicles for genuine democracy.
Genuine democracy means informed democracy. Not information about who’s ahead, but information about the actual condition of the country, including states and localities, and the world. Every moment spent discussing the latest polls is a moment not spent trying to figure out and depict what is actually going on.
In the entire presidential campaign, the truly salient questions facing us were only minimally discussed. For instance, what are the realities of global warming in terms of coastline erosion and flooding, forced migrations, epidemics, economic changes and political instability?
What about questions regarding real, structural changes in the American and world economies? What now is the status of work? What is the status of production and consumption? Have both the labor/production and the consumer economies been radically transformed? What are we to do about that? What jobs, realistically, will people actually have? What power might working and non-working people hope to exert?
These enormous changes are taking place with increasing velocity. They are not new. They have been building for some time. But now we are experiencing them with real force, and voters must understand them.
And yet they were not explored, not discussed at all, or hardly at all, by the campaigns or by the media. In their place, we got the poll numbers – and, of course, scandals, another key component in the electoral-entertainment industry.
If people do not understand the real conditions of their world, how can they make decisions that will benefit it?
End the polling industry and the electoral-entertainment industry. Stop the short-sighted campaign emphasis on the tactical. These do nothing but harm to our democracy.
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