What is this country's obsession with polling?
The day before Election Day, every paper and Web site that even pretends to have anything to do with the news is showing maps of the U.S. divided into red and blue states and results from polls that, by the way, hardly ever match.
USA Today says Barack Obama has an 11-percentage-point lead on John McCain, a lead that they say is widening.
The Wall Street Journal puts Obama ahead by only 8 percentage points and says McCain is quickly catching up.
Call me ignorant, but if the polls are accurate, shouldn't they be consistent?
All of these efforts to predict the outcome are an enormous waste of time and resources. People are being paid to come up with these numbers, and chances are extremely good that the numbers will end up being completely wrong anyway.
No poll can accurately predict the intracies of the human mind and every human's tendency to change his mind multiple times. So all the polls are really doing is adding more confusion to the situation.
I don't know about everyone else, but I kind of want to be surprised. I hate when people ruin the ending.
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1 comment:
I try not to get caught up in the pre-election polls. If you have ever noticed, they tend to change very quickly. I also find that a lot of news organizations tend to be inaccurate. How can you possibly predict something like that?
Nevertheless, I thought a lot of news organizations, particularly MSNBC and CNN, utilized polling as a great example of converged journalism. It's something that gets readers and viewers involved.
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