What impact do polls have on political campaigns? How would you assess the role that polls (and poll aggregating organizations like FiveThirtyEight.com or RealClearPolitics) played in the 2020 presidential election? In your opinion, is there too much emphasis on polls by the media, politicians, and/or the public OR is polling a valuable way to gauge political opinion? You must refer to Campaigns Ch. 5, one of the readings from Blackboard, and an outside source to support your response.
Polling has been an instrument used in political campaigns for the last 70 years and has served as a valuable tool in many elections, especially when creating their party’s platforms. “Pollsters try to form a sample group of people that looks like a microcosm of the electorate – one that proportionately reflects all demographic and ideological groups” (Sullivan, 2020) which allows campaigns to develop specific message for certain groups of people. Microtargeting has also been playing an increasing role in elections where “researchers have been able to use sophisticated algorithms to model the behavior of individuals”. (Semiatin, 2021). A prime example of this in the 2020 Election would be South Florida. The Republican party did a great deal of campaigning in which they painted the Democratic party as socialists. Since many inhabitants of South Florida are Cuban and have already lived through a socialist’s regime, they were inclined to vote red. While polls historically could be considered a valuable way to gauge how people think politically, the last two elections have proved differently.
ReplyDeletePolls are important if we know the source of the questions being asked. Aggregating organizations such as FiveThirtyEight.com or RealClearPolitics will conduct polls, put them together and then create their own conclusions from such polls which are then broadcasted on various media platforms. As we know, the 2020 Election received massive amounts of coverage and attention. This can be risky to the uninformed voter who could be easily swayed. “Many in the media bought the polls because they could not imagine that half the country was not as disgusted by Trump and his Republican “enablers” as they were”. (Thiessen, 2020). What this election brought out is that polls could work as lobbyists and the media can be biased. There is a growing dividing line in media and politics and the media has used sides to push their own agenda and their own narrative throughout the 2020 election.
It can be argued that some polling institutions have used their national prominence to persuade the way people think or vote. For example, many prestigious polling firms were predicting a blue wave (Democratic) in the past election throughout the Congress, Senate and Presidency, when in fact Biden won by a very slim margin and the exact opposite happened in Congress where the Republicans made great gains in representation. It was also argued by Trump supporters that this type of polling, showing Biden in such an insurmountable lead, suppressed the Trump voter who did not come out and vote because their candidate was apparently going to lose big time. Trump himself went as far to allege, without evidence, that the public polls “were designed to keep our voters at home, create the illusion of momentum for Mr. Biden and diminish Republics’ ability to raise funds.” (Shepard, 2020).
Polls will always have value, especially to those seeking political office as they rely on polls to develop their platforms and to represent their people in the right manner.
Works Cited
DeleteSemiatin, Richard J. Campaigns on the Cutting Edge. Thousand Oaks: CQ Press, 2021. Kindle.
Shepard, Steven. The polling industry blows it again. 6 November 2020. website . 15 November 2020. .
Sullivan, Mark. Why were the polls so far off again? Trump voters are near impossible to predict. 10 November 2020. website . 15 November 2020. .
Thiessen, Mark. The media is the big loser of the 2020 election. 5 November 2020. website . 2020 November 2020. .
Nicholas Ciampanelli
ReplyDeleteIn the political arena, public opinion polls are incredibly helpful in aiding political campaigns find pathways to victory. This can be either for dictating which candidate is winning a race (at a given moment in time) and which political issues are most prominent with voters. This data is particularly helpful for campaigns due to their need to employ microtargeting campaigns, which continuously plays a growing role in the electoral process. According to Campaigns on the Cutting Edge by Richard Semiatin, “Microtargeting involves using consumer data, appended to voter files, to more precisely target individual voters. As the amount of information in these databases has increased, researchers have been able to use sophisticated algorithms to model the behavior of individuals" (72). Such data allows campaigns to better communicate with diverse demographics.
With campaigns utilizing public opinion polling in this fashion, political polls and aggregate polls about the candidates are directly affected. This was apparent in the 2020 presidential election, for polls indicated a variety of meaningful insights about the candidates and various demographics (i.e. Trump leading with Latinos in Florida, Biden leading with blue collar workers in the Rust Belt). Despite these findings, polls were frequently discredited following the election due to “miscalculations” in the data, such as how many points Trump or Biden would win swing states by. In the article “Nate Silver defends his analysis of 2020 election polls” by Sam Dorman, Silver addresses this criticism by stating that “‘If you want certainty about election outcomes, polls aren’t going to give you that – at least not most of the time… [it is] astonishing that polls get within a couple of points the large majority of the time.’” This is because polls use samples rather than an entire population to capture findings, which inherently causes polling to be a flawed art (which is often forgotten by journalists and the public at-large). Therefore, polling played a key role in communicating data about demographics and swing states to the 2020 presidential candidates throughout the election.
Lastly, I believe polling is a valuable means of gauging public opinion. As someone who also studies data science, collecting and interpreting quantitative information is insightful to determining “what proportion of a population has a specific viewpoint,” according to “What Is Public Opinion Polling and Why Is It Important?” by Gallup World Poll. This data allows pollsters and campaigns to further extrapolate information and model the world at-large, enabling them to draw further conclusions and insights about a greater population. Without this information, the political landscape would be an “sea of troubles” for candidates to traverse without a map to charter their path to victory.
Works Cited
DeleteDorman, Sam. “Nate Silver Defends His Analysis of 2020 Election Polls.” Fox News, FOX News Network, 12 Nov. 2020, www.foxnews.com/politics/nate-silver-defends-pollsters-2020.
Semiatin, Richard J. Campaigns on the Cutting Edge. 4th ed., CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc., 2020, Follett BryteWave.
“What Is Public Opinion Polling and Why Is It Important?” Gallup World Poll: Methodological Design Sampling Statistical Validity.
Polls have always served as an important role in elections, specifically presidential elections. Questions asked by pollsters include “people’s issue preferences, engagement in the election, opinions about the candidates, views of the campaign and voter preferences” (Election Polling). The results of these polls are used not only by journalists and the American voters to better understand what is going on in elections and politics in general, but they are also used by campaigns to understand what states they should be targeting and what topics they should be focusing on.
ReplyDeletePolls and their methodology towards how they go about their results were heavily put into question by the media, specifically in 2016. According to Denton’s “Campaigns on the Cutting Edge,” “FiveThirtyEight, a website that aggregates and analyzes polling data, surveyed twenty-eight prominent national and state pollsters, and all but two predicted that Clinton would be elected president” (65). Because of the landslide that the polls predicted for Hillary Clinton, she was fully prepared to become the President Elect. She has pant suits and speeches planned for after her victory. The inaccuracy of her presidential win was blamed on the fact that voter preferences in swing states changed in the last few weeks of the election, state-level polls underestimated the “silent majority” in Pennsylvania and state-level polls did not account for the overrepresentation of college graduated in polls (Denton 66).
Now that the 2020 presidential election has (for the most part) come and gone, the polls have proved to be incorrect once again. Looking in the past and in the present, “pollsters are wondering whether their methods are fundamentally broken – or just unable to measure Trump’s support” (Shepard). Trump’s “silent majority” that he credits to his 2016 win seemingly led to results that showed that in this election, “Trump clearly overperformed in many of the battlegrounds, winning some toss-ups comfortably and running close in states where Biden had big poll leads” (Shepard). To give examples, Biden had more than an eight-point lead in Wisconsin, but he only ended up less than one point ahead after Election Day. To further my point, Biden was up by more than two points in Florida prior to Election Day, and Trump defeated Biden by more than three points (Shepard). Donald Trump took to social media on November 11 to share his thoughts, saying “Everyone is asking why the recent presidential polls were so inaccurate when it came to me. Because they are FAKE, just like much of the Lamestream Media!” (@realDonaldTrump). He continued to call out the major pollsters in a tweet saying “.@FoxNews, @QuinnipiacPoll, ABC/WaPo, NBC/WSJ were so inaccurate with their polls on me, that it really is tampering with an Election. They were so far off in their polling, and in their attempt to suppress - that they should be called out for Election Interference...” (@realDonaldTrump).
Polls did not only get this election wrong for the presidential race, but they also got it wrong for some Senate races. For example, I closely followed the Senate race between Senator Lindsey Graham and Jaime Harrison. This race was important because you had an incumbent who was running for his third term opposing a former lobbyist. According to a Quinnipiac poll taken between September 10th-14th, Graham and Harrison were both tied at forty-eight percent. Back when Quinnipiac polled from July 30th-August 3rd, they were both tied at forty-four percent (Real Clear Politics). While this looked like it would be a close race, Election Day proved different. According to the NY Times election results, Jaime Harrison only secured forty-four percent of the vote. Lindsey Graham won by just about ten points.
After these last two elections, I believe that the media should stop predicting the winners of elections based off of polls. If you are predicting a president to be so far ahead, it discourages voters to go out to the polls to vote for the other party, because they feel as though their vote holds no weight. In contrast, if you have an election that is seemingly close, according to polls, it encourages both parties to go out and vote for the candidate that they support, because the results could swing in any which direction. I think a good example of this would be Wisconsin. Wisconsin was predicted to be a Biden win; however, it came down to be a neck and neck state. Where I think that polls are beneficial in gauging political opinion is issue preferences. This is a way for American voices to be heard. If a high percentage of voter’s want to hear about a specific issue that affects our country, then candidates and their campaigns can start talking about it.
Delete“Election Polling.” Pew Research Center Methods, Pew Research Center, www.pewresearch.org/methods/u-s-survey-research/election-polling/.
Robert E. Denton, Jr., Judith S. Trent, Robert V. Friedenberg. Political Campaign Communication Principles & Practices, 9th Edition . Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.
Shepard, Steven. “The Polling Industry Blows It Again.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 6 Nov. 2020, www.politico.com/news/2020/11/06/polling-industry-blows-it-again-434591.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1326673298692972544
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1325961114514038786
“Election 2020 - South Carolina Senate - Graham vs. Harrison.” Real Clear Politics, www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/senate/sc/south_carolina_senate_graham_vs_harrisha-7083.html.
“South Carolina U.S. Senate Election Results.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 3 Nov. 2020, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-south-carolina-senate.html.
Matt Gallo
ReplyDeletePolls have always had a strong influence and impact on political campaigns. Although not always completely accurate, they are at times a useful tool for the candidates and their party. With this being said, there are times where the polls can be very incorrect, and even have the potential to sway a non-informed voter. As media and close coverage of candidates continues to emerge in this new world of technology, more factors go into the voter’s mind when it comes to making a decision on a vote. According to the Campaigns on the Cutting Edge textbook, when regarding to cells phones it mentions, “In 2016, cell phones were abut 40-45 percent of any sample. By 2018, that number had jumped closer to 50 percent, and expectations are that in 2020 cell phones will be between 50 and 60 percent of surveys.” (Sematin, 67). If this is the projection of the amount of people that will be on their phone for the survey, the number of targeted ads and social media posts from the candidates and there are just going to continue to skyrocket in future elections. Obviously, we have never seen a President like Donald Trump who announces just about everything on social media, but the way the world is going, candidates and their parties will continue to get exposure on platforms.
Polls in this election played a pretty important role. Much like social media, polls have tremendous potential to sway a voter one way or another. When thinking about it from a broader perspective, polls are pretty impressive. In a free country where everyone has the right to think for themselves, throughout history polls have shown the country the most likely possible outcome. In an article from Fox News, Nate Silver who is a lead analyst at FiveThirtyEight mentioned “Between the 18 states and congressional districts that we considered to be competitive this cycle, it looks as though the final FiveThirtyEight polling averages will have underestimated Trump by around 3.7 percentage points, on average”(Dorman). In my opinion, having a candidate miss by 3.7 percentage points when the population of America exceeds 328 million people is still an accurate representation. Although I agree that for the most part these polls are accurate, they should not be as publicized as they have been historically. People and Americans especially are so easily influenced and are unable to come to a conclusion on their own. As it can be a helpful tactic for candidates either claiming the polls are right and they should vote for them like Biden this past year, or claim the polls are wrong and we need to fix them like Trump. I think where we miss that 3.7% is in the silent majority of voters from either side. In an article by Pew Research Center they claim “…not all poll respondents who supported Trump may have been honest about their support for him, either out of some sort of concern about being criticized for backing the president or simply a desire to mislead.”(Keeter). This is the sole reason why polls can be misleading at times, and like how we saw in 2016 shock the political world. As a whole I do believe we should begin to not use the polls to sway our personal vote. Hearing what other people think is always an enormous influence especially when some people are not well informed in politics. Polls should be utilized and be available more for the candidates rather than the general public.
Dorman, S. (2020, November 12). Nate Silver defends his analysis of 2020 election polls. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nate-silver-defends-pollsters-2020
Keeter, S., Kennedy, C., & Deane, C. (2020, November 13). Understanding how 2020 election polls performed and what it might mean for other kinds of survey work. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/13/understanding-how-2020s-election-polls-performed-and-what-it-might-mean-for-other-kinds-of-survey-work/
Semiatin, Richard J. Campaigns on the Cutting Edge. 4th ed., CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc., 2020, Follett BryteWave.
Tim Powers
ReplyDeletePolls have become very controversial in presidential politics. Largely, their validity has come into question after the 2016 election had them predicting Hillary Clinton winning the 270 electoral votes needed for the White House. However, that was not correct as the world would soon find out. Donald Trump would win the election with more than the necessary number of electoral votes. For the 2020 presidential election, the same questions arose and once again the polls showed they were wrong in some states.
Polls are very important to political campaigns. They let the campaigns know how much of a possibility there is that their candidate will win. For example, according to Richard Semiatin in Campaigns on the Cutting Edge, “at a postelection rally in December 2016, Trump said that “he expected to lose the election to Democrat Hillary Clinton, based on polls showing him behind in several critical states” (66). In other words, the polls were critical in the Trump campaign’s belief that they were going to lose the 2016 election.
The polls for the 2020 election made numerous mistakes in predicting what the outcome was going to be. According to David Leonhardt in The New York Times, “most polls underestimated President Trump’s strength, in Iowa, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Instead of winning a landslide, as the polls suggested, Joseph R. Biden Jr. beat Mr. Trump by less than two percentage points in the states that decided the election.” In other words, the polls overestimated Biden in numerous states and did not account for how the close the election would be in certain states. In other words, the polls seem to be leaning towards the Democratic candidate for the second time in an election, only for the Republican candidate to be stronger than originally believed. However, despite numerous mistake and wrong predictions in the polls, “not all states suffered a polling misfire. In many important states that Biden won (at least based on current vote totals), including Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada and Virginia, polls gave a solid read of the contest” (Ketter, Kennedy, Deane). In other words, the polls were right in some respects, while wrong in others. This ultimately means that the polls in the 2020 election were right and wrong. However, do these rights overrule the wrongs?
In my own opinion, there is too much emphasis on polls in the political arena. We have seen recently how wrong they have been in the 2016 election and the 2020 election. So, ultimately, we will never know the winner of the election until the votes are actually being counted. Polls told us Clinton was winning in 2016. She didn’t. That is extremely off when you predict one candidate to win and the other ends up being the actual winner. While the polls did have Biden winning and he did actually win. He lost in areas that the polls had him winning in. I believe it is now the time for the polls to disappear from the election because they are unreliable. Polls are just a sample of people they only tell us what those people believe. There are still millions more out there wanting to share their own voice.
Works Cited:
DeleteKeeter, S., Kennedy, C., & Deane, C. (2020, November 13). Understanding how 2020 election polls performed and what it might mean for other kinds of survey work. Retrieved November 15, 2020, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/13/understanding-how-2020s-election-polls-performed-and-what-it-might-mean-for-other-kinds-of-survey-work/
Leonhardt, D. (2020, November 12). 'A Black Eye': Why Political Polling Missed the Mark. Again. Retrieved November 15, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/us/politics/election-polls-trump-biden.html
Semiatin, Richard J., et al. Campaigns on the Cutting Edge. 4th ed., CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc., 2021.
Xavier Cullen
ReplyDeleteOpinion polls play a major role in how candidates view the state of their campaign and what they must do going forward. For example, if a candidate sees themselves trailing in the polls, they will typically be using attack and negatives ads more. “The further behind one is in a campaign, the more attacks or negative ads used. If an incumbent falls behind, the attacks will be more personal on issues of character or competence than on policy” (Campaigns). This can be seen as an act of desperation for the candidate, as they see themselves slipping further and further away from the lead, and need to pull out all the stops to get an advantage, even if that means getting personal.
In the 2020 presidential election, there was a lot of speculation regarding the validity of poll organizations like FiveThirtyEight.com and RealClearPolitics. Biden was projected to win in a landslide against President Trump, but instead won in a very slim margin. However, those websites are meant for the general public, and internal polling by the two candidates pushed them to campaign heavily in swing states such as Michigan, which some polls said was a lock for Biden, and spend little time in Texas, which polls said was a toss-up (Newsweek). This difference between public polls and private polls done by the campaigns might mean that the public might not be as well informed in who is in the lead than the candidates themselves.
I personally do not believe that polls should be treated as the holy decider of elections as they are right now. Based on the past two elections, it’s hard to defend the inaccuracies that have been shown. For example, in Maine, Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight predicted Senator Susane Collins to lose handedly to challenger Sara Gideon, but when the votes came in, Collins won the race by 8.8 points (Fox News). In fact, as far as presidential polling goes, the New York Times studied to see what the election result would look like if presidential polling was as wrong as it was in 2016. Based on polling averages within one week of Election Day, Biden would be expected to win with 319 electoral votes (New York Times). Biden won with only 306, showing that 2020 was even worse for polls than 2016. I think given this information, it’s hard to trust polls when they consistently get the outcome of elections wrong.
Robert E. Denton, Jr., et al. "Communicative Types and Functions of Televised Political Advertising." Political Campaign Communication: Principles and Practices, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
Tarbous, Ken. "As Inaccurate Polls Sapped Public Trust, the Best Polling Was Done Privately." Newsweek, 6 Nov. 2020, www.newsweek.com/inaccurate-polls-sapped-public-trust-best-polling-was-done-privately-1545606.
Dorman, Sam. "Nate Silver Defends His Analysis of 2020 Election Polls." Fox News, 11 Nov. 2020, www.foxnews.com/politics/nate-silver-defends-pollsters-2020.
Cohn, Nate. "The Day in Polls: Polls Are Usually More Accurate As Election Day Nears." The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2020, www.nytimes.com/live/2020/presidential-polls-trump-biden/polls-are-usually-more-accurate-as-election-day-nears.
MATTHEW BRUIN
ReplyDeletePART ONE
After the major discrepancies that were seen following the 2016 presidential election, it was hard to believe that such a miscalculation could happen again in 2020… but… somehow it did. And because of another significant miscalculation for the 2020 election, I think that the polling industry’s credibility is as stake, as it should be.
As a voter myself, I will never trust the polls when analyzing or predicting election outcomes again. Instead, I believe that polls have an unavoidable negative impact on all aspects of the American political processes, polls overall hurt elections instead of helping them, and I believe that there is far too much emphasis on polls by the media, politian’s, and the public, which ultimately makes me think that polling is NOT a valuable way to gauge political opinion.
Starting out, it is important to understand how badly the polling industry was at predicting the 2016 and the 2020 election. For example, in 2016 a mid-October poll from FiveThirtyEight surveyed twenty-eight national and state pollsters and “all but two predicted that Clinton would be elected president,” (Semiatin 65). Based on such a strong and convincing prediction that the polling industry had shown, Hillary Clinton herself “was so certain of her success that she planned symbolic outfits to wear both on election night and on her first trip to Washington, D.C., as the president-elect,” and did not have a backup if she lost (Semiatin 65). In other words, “both the Clinton and Trump campaigns, expected Hillary Clinton to win the election.” Even the Republican National Committee expected that Trump was not going to receive more than 204 electoral votes and that Trump “had a little chance of winning any of the battleground states, and that even dead-red Georgia was a toss-up” (Semiatin 65-66). However, as we obviously know today, Trump ended up winning the election with 304 electoral college votes compared to Clinton’s 227. At the same time, even though Clinton won the popular vote by three-million votes, Trump was still elected the president and it became evidently clear that all the polls were wrong. Now, because of this 2016 miscalculation, the question around the accuracy and credibility of polling was a major concern which confused many Americans making it hard for many to believe any poll that was used for the 2020 election likewise.
MATTHEW BRUIN
ReplyDeletePART TWO
Now, in 2020, the polls were wrong again. For example, both the public and private polling institutes thought that election night was going to be “a big democratic night,” expecting Biden to win big and for democrats to “benefit down the ballot” (Shepard). However, Republican’s unexpectedly ran a very tight race nationally making some state projections “to close to call” in many scenarios which was far from anticipated. Additionally, it was said that Trump was going to lose the battleground state of Wisconsin by double digests, but instead, “Trump lost Wisconsin by a point, not the 17-point defeat one survey suggested.” (Shepard). In the same regard, many polls indicated that Trump was going to be defeated by a democratic landslide and that the race was going to be far from close. However, although Biden is currently the projected winner as the polls indicated prior to the election, pollsters were still way off in a broader sense in terms of the “blue wave” or landslide that was expected. Now, this was the second time in a row they were wrong and all the explanations given for 2016’s inaccuracies seemingly were wrong too. Instead, the polling institutions are looking like the boy who cried wolf.
Now, because of these two significantly wrong predictions that the polls yielded in 2016 and 2020, it is evidently clear that the polls are becoming harder to trust in general. In many ways, because the media relies on these polls for creating political news, I believe that it makes the media less credible and less important in our lives. In other words, if the polls were wrong, and the media uses the polls to inform people, then there is no beneficial outcome from following media if the news and the polls are all misleading. With that being said, I believe that using any polls for upcoming elections comes at a cost, but the question as to why polls are becoming less reliable is important to understand too.
For example, polling has become more challenging because “cell phones, answering machines, and caller ID” came into existence overall making it “increasingly difficult” to reach respondents by phone (Semiatin 66). In the same sense, due to the challenge of finding respondents, because of the answering machines and caller ID, the number of calls pollsters need to do to get a complete sample takes much longer. When looking at the “typical response rate of 3 to 8 percent,” it is said that now, “pollsters need to call ten times the number of phones needed to get a sufficient sample size,” (Semiatin 67). Now, aside from the polls in the past two elections being very inaccurate and hard to trust, polling especially is hard to justify and trust also because it takes a lot longer and costs a lot more than it used to. Here, this shows the creation of a unjust paradox that exposes the truth behind polling that adds to why polling is useless in today’s politics. For example, now because polling has been so misleading for two elections in a row is should be clear that the time and money needed to fund polling is no longer justified. In my eyes, why spend more time and money for something on something that is so unreliable and risky.
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ReplyDeleteMATTHEW BRUIN
ReplyDeletePART 3
Additionally, because of technology and society changing in terms of the American political process, I think that today’s politically divisive climate is also to blame for the poll’s inaccuracies. For example, it is said that “amid the erosion of political disclosure, a fear of retaliation has spread, pitting neighbor against neighbor and squashing the political exchange that fuels a thriving democracy,” (Gowen, Craig). It was also found that “a democrat in North Carolina changed her voting affiliation, scared to be outed in a red state” and “a republican in Washington stopped speaking to his democrat neighbors and lied to pollsters about his support for President Trump, calling himself the ‘silent majority,’” (Gowen, Craig). By seeing instances like those outlined above, it is clear politics is becoming more divisive and making people less likely to speak the truth. In some cases, people are even lying to pollsters which completely dismantles the meaning and the credibility within any poll. Just when looking at this one instance, polling is not justified right here alone with the idea that people admit they are lying when they are surveyed. In conclusion, because politics is becoming more personal and violent in some cases, it is clear that political honesty in polling is gone too, giving more reason not to trust the polling industry at large.
Ultimately, after understanding the mistakes that were made in 2016 and 2020, along with the challenges and the reasoning behind why polls are possibly inaccurate, I think that it is blatantly clear of a lot of things. On top of the time and money that goes into the modern polling, it’s the inaccuracies of the 2016 and 2020 elections, the change in technology and society as a whole, and the political divisive climate that begun to break the trust and credibility behind the polls in general. Additionally, because of all the misleading truths outlined above, the use of the polls in the media or as a form of a credible source yields only a negative outcome that I think is not worth trusting for any future elections. With that being said, I fully believe that polls today impose too much of a negative impact on all aspects of the American political processes, that polls overall hurt election outcomes by being misleading and causing too much confusion, and I also think that the media, politian’s, and the public, need to stop putting trust and emphasis on the polls. In the end, is is clear that polling in today’s times is NOT a valuable way to gauge political opinion.
Work Cited
Craig, Tim, and Annie Gowen. “Politics Pit Neighbor against Neighbor as Election Day Looms.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 1 Nov. 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/national/people-are-scared-politics-pit-neighbor-against-neighbor-as-election-day-looms/2020/10/31/ae4bb794-1a67-11eb-82db-60b15c874105_story.html.
Semiatin, Richard J. Campaigns on the Cutting Edge. Thousand Oaks: CQ Press, 2021. Kindle.
Shepard, Steven. The polling industry blows it again. 6 November 2020. website . 15 November 2020. .
*have begun (edit in second paragraph)
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