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January 10, 2008, 01:30 PM ET
N.H. Polling Crash: More Sure to Come
Post-New Hampshire, suggestions for news consumers from a longtime reporter (me):
Be wary of predictions. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, not even the weather man, and certainly not the political pollsters. Extend this principle to many other matters, including rosy forecasts concerning new drugs and treatments, and outcomes in sports.
Ignore reports of what politicians think. Nobody knows what any one else thinks. What people say is knowable; so is what they’re observed doing. What they really think is unknowable, and in politics is often deliberately disguised.
Reject cosmic assertions, such as the many post-9/11 declarations that nothing will ever be the same. Some things are not the same, but most are.
Recognize that a news report is not an encyclopedia article. It’s generally a hurried assemblage of information available at deadline — and most are reasonably accurate.
Predictions are inherently unsafe, but it is safe to predict post-New Hampshire that the press and the pollsters will again make fools of themselves in this election season and many to come. They’ve been doing it at least since 1936, when the top poll of that era confidently forecast that FDR would lose big to Alf Landon, who went down in a landslide. Many other whoppers were to come, including, most famously, the 1948 polling debacle that forecast Dewey over Truman.
The futurology that fills the press is fed by popular hunger to know the future before it occurs, compounded by competitive pressures in the news business and the reportorial yen to project omniscience.
Polling is a commercial enterprise that, between elections, earns its way sniffing out consumer preferences for soap, spaghetti sauce, and underwear. Most of it is quackery in the guise of scientific methodology. It is a curse on politics, and is the main source of the finger-to-wind tactics that pollute politics and turn candidates into chameleons.
Polling should be in the back of the paper alongside the daily horoscope. But it sells by satisfying that obsession with the future. So, predicably, polling reports will remain Page One and top of the broadcast. Count on that.
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