Supporters must agree, once and for all, on what pre-election numbers really show
Oh, those dastardly polls.
They seem to have done it again. Desperately confusing most people and giving some the ammunition they need to do their jobs, is it possible that we are really are putting too much stock into their numbers?
We need to realize that they are, in fact, merely blips on the political map, snapshots in time where about 1,000 registered voters told a pollster over their landline who they were going to vote for.
I have a problem with the amount of words that have been completely wasted about how all these polls are skewed in the direction of President Barack Obama and how they are just being used to try to affect how the American people perceive this election.
I got really sick of giving a smile-and-nod to my friends who complained about the polls when they were in the favor of Mitt Romney.
Wow, how things can change so suddenly.
Now, Romney is leading most polls after his admitted walloping of President Obama in last Wednesday’s debate. Somehow, the president came off looking extremely hollow and dejected and not surprisingly, the effect showed up in the polls this week. So now the people who were scoffing at the validity of these polls are still going to spurn the idea of allowing polls to affect their view of the election, right?
Of course not! This week, the exact same people are now creating quite the hoopla around their candidate. This week those polls just confirm to those people that their candidate actually does have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually swaying the American people. Imagine that. Romney is finally winning votes; I never thought I would see the day.
There are really only two possibilities: Either the polls are misleading, like the Romney camp was shouting last week, and the Obama camp is shouting this week, or they are unbiased, rough predictions of how the nation views the candidates. Notice the “rough predictions” part of that last sentence. The pre-election polls gauge a small segment of the population and generalize those findings to the rest of the nation. These polls aren’t going to crown the next president, or any politician for that matter, so why do we continue to treat them as if they do? There surely have to be other things going on that are more worthy of front page coverage. We’re all sick of hearing about the afternoon poll bump Romney got after Obama capitalized on the momentum he received with a poll bump after breakfast.
All that I really want here is some consistency. Let’s all just decide right now to make up our minds, once and for all, on whether we like polls or do not, and then act and formulate opinions. If done in reverse order, you tend to sound trivial, and trivial people get the smile-and-nod.
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