Who’s polling who?
29th November 2021 · 0 Comments
What’s up with the recent rash of polls spelling defeat for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024? What are the meager approval numbers for Biden and Harris about?
Let’s take a look at a few articles with poll numbers that bode ill for the Biden-Harris administration:
FiveThirtyEight recently published, “How unpopular is Joe Biden?” with poll results from 25 polls conducted this month. According to the polls, 36-49 percent of those polled approve of the job Biden’s doing, while 47-52 percent disapprove.
Newsweek’s “Donald Trump Wallops Joe Biden, Kamala Harris in 44 percent of respondents said they’d vote for Trump if he is a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, while 39 percent said they’d vote for Biden.
The article also published low approval ratings for Biden’s handling of the presidency. In a Quinnipiac poll, 36 percent of Americans said they approve of his handling of the presidency while 53 percent said they disapprove.
Yet, in a different article, “GOP Still Wants Trump to Run in 2024 Despite Majority of Country Saying Otherwise: Poll,” Newsweek wrote that a poll released last week by Marquette University Law School found 71 percent of respondents do not want Trump to run.
The article stated, “Just 28 percent of the adults surveyed nationwide favored a Trump run. However, the survey found that a majority of Republicans favored the former president making a run for a second term. Sixty percent of Republicans surveyed said they felt he should run, while 40 percent of Republicans surveyed said they did not want to see him on the ballot.” The survey also found that 73 percent of independents who responded to the survey were not in favor of a Trump run, and 26 percent want Trump on the ticket.
USA TODAY offered a “Gloomy landscape for Democrats in midterms as Biden’s approval drops to 38 percent in USA TODAY/Suffolk poll.”
The article stated, “A year before the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans hold a clear lead on the congressional ballot as President Joe Biden’s approval rating sinks to a new low of 38 percent.” A USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found that Biden’s support cratered among the independent voters who delivered his margin of victory over President Donald Trump one year ago.”
Nearly half of those surveyed, 46 percent, say Biden has done a worse job as president than they expected, including 16 percent of those who voted for him. By 7-1 (44%-6%), Independents say he’s done worse, not better than they expected.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans, 64 percent, say they don’t want Biden to run for a second term in 2024. That includes 28 percent of Democrats. Opposition to Trump running for another term in 2024 stands at 58 percent, including 24 percent of Republicans. Vice President Kamala Harris’ approval rating is 28 percent – even worse than Biden’s.
Once upon a time, polls were used to gauge public opinion on products, businesses, and, mostly, political candidates and elected officials. It was understood that a survey was a mere snapshot of the view of the people polled.
Outside of the polling industry, everyday people assume that polls are an unbiased, truthful portrait of public opinion. Whether the results are good or bad for the object of the opinion collections, polls are expected to be a reliable sample of how the public, writ large, thinks about a given subject.
We don’t know if that was ever true, but just analyzing these media headlines sends the message that we can’t trust the polls and especially not the media outlets that are reporting them.
Which begs the question, who is polling whom? Let that sink in for a moment. Have you been polled lately by the leading pollsters? Or ever?
It is our opinion that polls certainly smack of bias and an attempt to sway public opinion all on their own. Why?
It is also our view that polls are yet another form of voter suppression, intentionally or unintentionally. Who came up with the formula of talking to a small group/sample of people – say 1,000-1,200 – who we are supposed to rely on as representative of the public at large – 300 million Americans – who represent the viewpoint of the majority?
This represents an attempt to suppress the votes of people who may be influenced not to go out to vote. Why waste our time to go out and stand in line when we’re being told our vote doesn’t matter because the polling says I’m in the minority. Or vice versa: We don’t have to vote because one more voice to add to the total of the majority won’t matter.
Again, who’s polling who? And who really answers polling questions? And how can we trust the answers?
If we’re being honest, the whole polling industry is suspect. A pollster can ask questions to elicit desired answers in favor of or against anyone and anything.
“An attempt can be made to use polls to influence rather than to reflect public opinion. Polls can be manipulated to give a false picture of public opinion. Moreover, there is evidence that since polls are believed to be reliable and useful, the public could be misled by unreliable surveys,” according to “Are Polls Useful,” an analysis published by the American Historical Society.
And polls have been proven to be wrong. Remember all the exit polls had Hillary Clinton winning the presidency on election night in 2016. They were dead wrong. Could it be that people actually voted for Trump but were too ashamed to let people know publicly, so they said they voted for HRC?
Who knows? We should trust our own eyes, ears, and your own opinion when it comes to choosing candidates and anything else that is subject to polling.
Don’t believe the hype and don’t believe the polls. Take the time to research, form your own opinion. Use your deductive reasoning, not from a poll of a handful of folk that should never be construed as representative of the diverse citizenry of this country.
This article originally published in the November 29, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
