by Emily Kay
Those stupid, annoying polls.
One day, the media want you to believe the republikkans will sweep democracy out the door by dashing Democrats’ hopes of retaining majorities in the House and Senate. The next day, they’ll tell you the dems will shock the MAGAts and send the craven followers of the twice-impeached, one-term loser back into the slime from which they oozed.
If the sampling numbers have you yo-yoing between deep depression and euphoria, well, here’s a story that may convince you never, ever to believe those blasted polls.
Our tale begins back in 1975 — the year Chevy Chase first announced, “Live From New York, it’s Saturday Night”; the Vietnam War officially ended; and the Red Sox lost the World Series to the Reds.
That same year, the professors in my Masters in Journalism program at American University assigned our class to poll D.C. residents on several political issues. They informed us that our results would appear on the front page of The Washington Post, which we all believed was pretty cool. Each night for a week, we sat in separate prof’s offices with rosters of phone numbers and a five-page list of questions we were to ask each person we reached.
Washington is a town of transients, however, with a population that turns over each time a new administration occupies the White House. So, after a frustrating hour of dialing disconnected numbers, I huddled with my colleagues to commiserate.
It turned out that many of my fellow miscreants realized before I did how pointless it was to keep chasing nonexistent phone numbers, or spend 15 minutes asking a zillion questions when we connected with an actual human being.
After that confab, we spent the next several nights filling in the surveys without making any calls. Some of us amused ourselves by checking answers off in various patterns, while others checked all the first or last answers or marked the polling sheets in a random fashion.
No matter how we chose to take that shortcut, the Post did indeed run our “findings” on Page One (and our profs never discovered our shenanigans — until now; oops!).
That’s why I approach all polls with extreme cynicism and completely ignore them. And I am hardly the only one who shares that opinion.
Whether or not you wish to reject polling numbers, let’s concentrate on actual votes that can save democracy. The only way to do that is to get out the blue vote by canvassing, phoning, and texting like crazy in the days ahead. And, of course, casting our own votes as well.
To help get out the vote in such critical swing states as Pennsylvania, Arizona, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia, please check out our Action Springboard.
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