National political polls, primary election polls, state polls and candidate tracking polls are a menace. This is not your first year that polls and pollsters have attempted to continue the results, subvert democracy and discourage voters and, for that matter, candidates.
The public’s disgust in polls and pollsters has peaked in 2016 because the media has become so obsessed, and their addiction to taking polls, promoting polls and predicting election results is plain sickening, shameless and pathetic.
The fact is that polls are inaccurate, meaningless, manipulated and toxic. Pollster hustlers manufacture polling data for their candidate clients and media, and media pollsters feverishly invent polls to fill a 24-hour cable news cycle. While they are busy treating primaries and elections as a game, they fail to actually cover issues and candidate backgrounds. They fail to fact-check candidate records and proposals and fail to provide the public with info on how each candidate would face serious issues the next president will have to face.
The polling industry and their irresponsible TV collaborators add nothing positive to the election process, but do damage to our democracy by perpetuating click, cynical, shallow polls, which they pass off as journalism. Television’s charts and graphics do not begin to offer an intelligent, thorough or relevant approach to providing information and news that voters require when considering candidates.Â
As voters, it is our responsibility to discover reliable and mature news sources, dismiss juvenile media and the polling epidemic, settle on a candidate we like and vote. Vote in every election.
Chuck Levin