Griper Blade: Polling and Human Behavior

As big scandals go, it lacks big sexiness. A lawsuit between the lefty blog DailyKos and their (former) polling firm Research 2000 has all the thrilling intrigue of a fishing show and paint drying combined. Even my eyes glazed over reading the posts about it at FiveThirtyEight.com -- and I love this factual data stuff.

Ok, so that's how you write an exciting lede. I've totally got you hooked with the promise of crushing boredom, statistics, math, and general inside-baseball wonkiness. Who could possibly resist reading further? Except I'm not going to write about any of that -- it's better covered in the links above than anything I could do. Suffice it to say that Research 200 is probably pretty bad and that DailyKos was more than likely getting ripped off.

What I want to talk about is how dependent we've become on polling. Public opinion polling is a weird thing, both factual and invented, both real and unreal. It's been a long-standing complaint (especially on the right, where their ideas tend to poll badly) that you can get any poll results you want by the phrasing of the questions. That's only kinda sorta true. Polling outfits don't really hide their questions, so there's no reason to assume the question is faulty. "If the election were held today, would you vote for X or Y?" is pretty cut and dried. And that's the way most questions are formed. When people make this argument, you'll notice they never explain what was wrong with the question...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]