David Michael Miller
In a recent article in The New York Times, a past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research wrote that polling is in “near crisis” and that there is no apparent solution.
Cliff Zukin, a professor of political science and public policy at Rutgers, noted that the response rate for pollsters, once at 80%, is now down to an astonishing 8%. So, for every 10 calls a survey taker makes, less than one actually answers the questions. That means a lot more calls, a lot more expense and a lot less ability for candidates to afford to rely on polling to shape their positions.
In addition, the low response rate skews the results since there are characteristics among that patient and earnest sliver of people who will sit still long enough for a pollster that probably make them different from the rest of the electorate. Further complicating matters are the problems posed by cell phones versus landlines.
All of this has led to unpredictable results in recent elections in the U.S., Israel and Great Britain, among other places, where the polls turned out to be wildly inaccurate.
What this means for politicians is that often they’re flying blind. Pandering becomes more of an art and less of a science. As a recovering former member of that profession I can see this benefiting liberal practitioners despite themselves.
That’s because it’s very conservative Republicans who take strong positions on the issues, and it’s liberals who are tentative. So, we have Republicans articulating strongly conservative positions while there is no balancing powerful liberal vision on the other side.
A good example is marriage equality. While Republicans raged against gay marriage when the polls were with them and continue to attack it even as the majority rapidly shifts in the other direction, Democrats mostly opposed same-sex unions until the polls told them it was safe to support it. I have no doubt that almost all leading Democrats, including President Obama, have long supported marriage equality, but they would not say so until they were sure they were in the majority. A party that thinks like that will be forever running to get in front of the parade and never actually lead it.
While I see a strong and clearly articulated conservative vision coming from virtually every candidate on the right, I can’t recognize anything comparable on the left — Bernie Sanders notwithstanding, because he is only one candidate. The rest of the party is hiding under the table.
Once liberal politicians start to understand that they can’t rely on polls, they might lose some of their inhibitions and decide — what the hell — to just say what they really think. That would be a good thing. Taking away liberals’ safety net might make them less cautious and turn some of them into actual leaders.
