Follow the Polls

If you're a regular reader you already have deduced that I don't put much stock in polls, you're a clever lot.

There's a poll for everything, especially in politics. The problem is we rarely know the exact words used in the questions, how many people were asked and exactly who are they. Most polls use hundreds of participants, occasionally thousands but beyond that would be virtually impossible. Experienced pollsters are gifted at getting the responses they need but equally gifted at justifying their accuracy by walking way into the weeds talking about demographics and "snapshots" in time. But if you follow a long series of polls on a variety of political topics you will find dramatic inconsistencies.

Here's an example. There is a poll that says 70% of the American people say the Country is headed in the wrong direction. Conservatives and Republicans say this is a direct rebuke of President Obama and liberals. They say the Country wants to move to the right, even though they had two chances to say no to Barack Obama. Democrats believe the poll is about people's economic fears. If Republicans are correct in their reading then why are there so many polls which show that Bernie Sanders would defeat Donald Trump by sizeable numbers. Sanders is a lifelong self identified democratic socialist just like those Europeans that Republicans say are just awful and that the American people don't want to be.

The talking heads never dig beneath the polls and ask in-depth questions about what exactly backs up the data nor do they point out all of the inconsistencies of these various polls.

Is America in decline? This is a favorite line of inquiry and supposedly a lot of people think so, but decline relative to what? The reality is that the United States was on the verge of a depression because of the housing crash. In the two terms under Barack Obama the facts show that the country has made a major comeback across the board. We have certainly bounced back better than the rest of the world which continues to be sluggish because of that crash. We certainly have some serious problems but consider how much better off we would be now if the Republican Party had not spent all of their energy trying to destroy the Obama Presidency and more on cutting deals which would have given them large percentages of what they wanted but would also have given Obama a victory, unfortunately for the country they couldn't live with that.

There's one poll that is always consistent, that Congress has a single digit approval rating. I believe that one but don't require a poll as proof, just ask every person that crosses your path.