To Poll, or Not to Poll?

Political surveys are incredibly accurate and mostly useless.

Responding to some of his colleagues who recently suggested the media’s obsession with reporting on political polls is bad for democracy, Environics head Michael Adams defends his industry in the Globe and Mail. Despite claims to the contrary polls are remarkably accurate, he says, and the industry is rapidly catching up with technological changes, focusing more on internet and cellphone polls in order to access the broadest spectrum of respondents as possible. All the major polling firms correctly predicted the outcome of the last election, he points out. “It’s true that surveys can vary in their quality,” he writes. “Ultimately, polls are just one more source of information,” and information is key in a healthy democracy. He conveniently avoids the central question however, which is not the accuracy of polls but the questionable value of treating every single spasmodic change in Canadians’ opinions as a genuine news story.

That’s the argument the Ottawa Citizen’s Susan Riley takes up. How exactly, she asks, are we supposed to interpret two polls one week apart that assert alternately the Conservatives’ attack ads are working and have boosted support, and that the Conservatives’ popularity has declined thanks to their attack ads? “For five years, party preferences have hardly budged, yet every twitch -every transitory blip, slip and ‘surge’ - sets off an orgy of pointless analysis,” she writes. Of course, the op-ed pages will always be full of pointless analysis, orgiastic or otherwise, but Riley’s point, and The Newsroom thinks it’s a good one, is that pollsters and pundits are mutual enablers, feeding off each other’s worst tendencies. The “unhealthy relationship between unqualified pollsters and headline-hungry media” and the resulting “confident assertions based on flimsy data” are useful for commentators and politicians willing to cherry-pick evidence to support their positions, Riley says, but don’t do much to help the average Canadian understand politics. That’s probably just as well in our opinion, because thanks to the sheer volume of polls released on a weekly basis, the average Canadian probably doesn’t pay much attention to them anyway.