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Bogus Polls: Meaningless Farce Or Looming Tragedy?" by Arianna Huffington.
I don't know if polls are entirely meaningless, though I think she's right pretty much. The effect of poll results upon the morale of voters is undeniable. People become discouraged and fall into despair and resignation when the numbers don't, momentarily, fall their way--though the polling may be utterly off or jiggered (deliberately or not), as Huffington says. We all yield to the temptation of despair at one time or another, just as we all succumb to the power of illusions. (Speaking of discouraging: Recall Jimmy Carter's notoriously early concession speach to Ronald Reagan, which infuriated then Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil who immediately called Carter, who had obviously lost the electoral vote, to ask just what the hell he thought he was doing when there were polls still open in California and on the West Coast and Congressional seats still up for grabs).
But remember, if you do not fight you will never win, just as the opposition wants. And this--this is for real. So some encouraging facts: Remember that liberal voters do not respond to telephone polls anywhere near to the extent that right-wing voters do. Why? Because for the most part we're at work during the hours that many telephone polls are conducted, and so even with the proliferation of cell-phones we're still not likely to be able to respond. Even during the evening we are more likely to be working. We are the ordinary, hard-working people who are the backbone of this country.
A word about that. There is this myth that Republicans and right-wingers want to believe--that they want decent, honest people to believe--that they want you to believe. That lie is that we are lazy, that we don't--and we won't--go to the polls come Election Day. But it's a myth, a lie, a virus of the mind. We do go to the polls, far more often and in greater numbers than they do; in the last Presidential election, more of us voted--and we won, but the wingnuts stole the Presidency from us. (And let's make this clear, we won the whole shebang, not just the popular vote; it wasn't the electoral system that failed (though that system is deeply flawed and unfair); as evidence subsequently showed, even with the system screwed-up unfairly against us we won . . . .)
So telephone poll results are predictably unbalanced in favor of the political right. Look, however, at the polls on the internet (which are "unscientific"--but see Huffington's article for a little more light on this), polls that can be accessed by anyone at anytime during the course of a day, and you'll see a different story. As was the case with the Cheney/Edwards debate. Shortly after, all of the online polls at the major tv news networks' websites showed that people thought Edwards the winner. Even Fox's poll--even at wingnut headquarters. And by a good percentage, too. Again, even at Fox's website, though I recall that one showed the smallest difference, with Edwards up by 8% or so when I visited.
