The problem with polls: Opinion researchers preach restraint for horserace journalists

[jayschool]

ELON, N.C. – They are Donald Trump’s raison d’être and cause for major Hillary Clinton headaches: Public opinion polls are the prime driver of much of the 2016 presidential campaign trail news. Media scholars semi-dismissively call such reporting “horse-race coverage.” Who’s ahead? Who’s behind? Who’s going to win?

But as cable news anchors hyperventilate in joyful anxiety every time they get to announce a new set of numbers, those who provide the data actually preach caution and restraint.

Donald Trump v. Bernie Sanders in 2016? Hold your horses, pollsters warn.

Andrew Smith is the director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, whose CNN/WMUR primary poll just this week found that Bernie Sanders has – as of now – taken a lead over the once seemingly all-but-crowned Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the first-in-the-nation state. But when Smith sat down with CU News Corps in late August, he pleaded not to let numbers carry you away.

[link:http://cunewscorps.com/3795/showcase/a-grain-of-salt/|

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. The problem with polls is twofold.

First, they only tell you about what's going on at a given moment in time. As we've seen, time gives people more chances to stumble, so the farther out in time you are, the more likely they are to be different from the 'poll' of actual voting.

Second, they often tell you things you (and the candidates) don't want to hear, but in so little detail that they don't really give an idea of what the problems are that need to be reversed to change the polls. I keep hearing the lament 'Why is O'Malley doing so poorly'? Nobody really knows. We can all give anecdotal guesses, but no one ever does polls in enough depth to answer such questions. And without knowing, he's stuck trying to simply guess at what he should do to try and improve his poll numbers.

So the advantage is to people who don't need polls. Who base their campaigns simply on being themselves and telling their history and the future they want to create, rather than trying to create their own history on the fly, chasing polls.