[SfN] One more thought on polls

[Paul Riismandel]

One thing to think about is that when you really invest yourself in 
considering, voting and even acting for a third party you not only have to 
question and reconsider the mainstream ideology of the two-party system, 
but you also have to question and reconsider the tools that help perpetuate 
that ideology.

Think about it -- who are the polls for?  Are these polls there to educate 
the citizen voter?  What possible service do polls do for us?

Realistically, not much at all.  Sure it might be nice to get a sense of 
how people are thinking, but how many polls are necessary to do this?  Two, 
six, ten?  A week?

The polls serve two primary purposes.  First, they serve the needs of the 
major party candidates--polls give them some "objective" data they can 
worry about and concentrate on, rather than probing deeper or worrying 
about something substantial.

Secondly--and this accounts for the sheer quantity of polls--they serve the 
purpose of the mainstream media  because polls become the news.  It's rich, 
relatively cheap and reliable content.  When else can Time magazine report 
on itself legitimately except when it conducts a poll.  Instead of doing 
costly investigative journalism on the candidates that might uncover their 
past misdeeds and positions (that would require paying a reporter to work 
for weeks or months on just one or two stories), the major networks, 
newspapers and magazines just conduct a new poll, and so the changes in the 
poll that week become the story.  Whether or not ANYTHING really happened.

  And, of course, neither of the candidates can get too pissed off about 
the polls since they're "objective data" about the voters.  But how pissed 
would Al and the Dems be if NBC made Jeffrey St. Clair and Alex Cockburn a 
lead story on the nightly news?  GE/NBC has no need to rock the boat that much.

So while it is easy and very tempting to take the polls seriously, and to 
let them either convince us that Ralph is doing well or to scare us into 
worrying that "gee, maybe I am contributing to the election of a fascist 
Bush regime,"  you just simply have to remind yourself that doing so is 
simply falling back into a pattern and mode of thought that you're 
attempting to resist in the first place.

The only polls that matter are the real ones on election day.

--Paul