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Last weekend the American Association of Public Opinion Research had its 53rd annual convention in St. Louis. The pollsters were there to celebrate their profession and look ahead to a bright future. But if you "agree strongly" or "agree somewhat" with me, you want that future to be bleak -- so bleak, in fact, that at least 90 percent (plus or minus four points) of them are forced into occupational retraining. I wouldn't even mind if it were government-funded. Maybe it could help them break into something less damaging -- like growing tobacco or producing "Jerry Springer."
It's been a good week for challenging entrenched behemoths, with students bringing down President Suharto and the Justice Department going after Monopolysoft. And, likewise, the time has come for pollsters.
I should confess up front that I'm their sworn enemy. Together with satirist and all-purpose good guy Harry Shearer, I have launched a campaign -- Partnership for a Poll-Free America -- intended to make the 54th annual pollster convention a lot less joyous than the 53rd. And if all goes well, by the year 2000, Harry and I -- a mere .00000001 percent of Americans 18 or older -- will ensure that the 55th conference doesn't take place.
What have pollsters done to deserve extinction, you may ask? Well, besides filling our heads with needless "factoids" -- like 59 percent of all Americans think "Ed" is an "okay" name, while 64 percent put on their pants left leg first -- they have brought our political system to its knees. Our politicians make no move without consulting the latest numbers from their favorite pollster. Far from being "out of touch" and having a "Beltway mentality," our political leaders are much too in touch. But the problem is, what we want from moment to moment and what we need over the long-term isn't always the same thing. Pollsters have become the enablers, keeping our politicians addicted to the short-term and the ephemeral.
One bit of good news is that there's already dissension in the ranks. John Zogby, the only pollster who accurately predicted the spread by which Clinton won over Dole, has been criticized by his fellow prognosticators for his procedures. "When it comes to methodology," says Lee Miringhoff of the rival Marist Institute, "he makes a lot of pollsters uncomfortable." (You'd think a pollster could be more exact than "a lot.") Another industry veteran, Maurice Carroll, snippily derides Zogby's methodology as "mysterious," while pollster Sheldon Gawiser complains that Zogby "will be successful sometimes, and sometimes he won't." As though the rest of the breed practice an exact and infallible science.
Pollsters have replaced leaders, the old-fashioned kind, who aren't afraid to make difficult and unpopular decisions, even when the polls and the consultants are against them. If Lincoln had listened to the guys at the pollsters' convention, he would more likely be known for something like Secretaries' Day than for freeing the slaves.
Alas, it seems that as long as pollsters exist, politicians are going to consult them. So in order to wean our political leaders off their daily numbers habit, what we need to do is make the numbers themselves completely unreliable. That's as easy as hanging up your phone.
That's right, every time a pollster calls, you can help save our democracy by simply putting the receiver in its cradle. Because of what they call "random-digit dialing," pollsters claim that "every person in America has an equal chance of being selected for one of our polls." Leaving aside for the moment the joke of treating this like some kind of lottery prize, what if more and more -- millions more of us -- select ourselves right out of the process just by refusing to answer pollsters' questions? According to Hal Quinley of Yankelovich Partners, that conducts the CNN/Time polls, the increasingly low response rates are a major "industry problem," very much discussed in St. Louis. The latest numbers are staggering: The response rate is at 33-34 percent, down from 37 percent last year. In other words, 66-67 percent are not playing.
So we have a great head start for our civil disobedience campaign. Once this fad sweeps the nation, the pollsters' sample will consist only of very bored, very lonely Americans who want somebody to talk to. As a result, polling data will become so polluted that it will be useless to politicians. Then maybe they'll stop feeding us so much candy (tends to rot the infrastructure) and put the country on a more healthy diet.
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