Just Say No...To Pollsters

In the wake of the "stunning" failure of public-opinion polls to predict accurately the result of the Democratic New Hampshire primary, perhaps it's appropriate to revive a cause Ms. Huffington and I championed, about a decade ago: boycotting polls.

Whether you look at the entertainment industry or the news business or our political culture, it's hard to see a beneficial effect that the ubiquitousness of this technology has had on our society. Cooperating with pollsters, and giving them more and more detailed information about ourselves, has at the very least abetted the rampant slicing and dicing of the population, the divisiveness which so many now bemoan. And certainly the incurable obsession of the MSM with the horse-race aspect of our presidential elections -- clearly on view today -- is fed, if not led, by the incessant drumbeat of daily polls, nightly tracking polls, exit polls, etc.

So what can one person do? Refuse to talk to pollsters, ever, anywhere, for any reason. You know now, after having heard the expressions of interest in your call from a million telephone-tree voices, that they don't care about what you think. They're just trying to find a new, better, more effective way of selling you a show, a product, a leader. So give it up. Go cold turkey. If you're approached at a voting location, tell 'em your ballot was secret and it's going to stay that way. If you're called, treat 'em like telemarketers -- pollsters are, in fact, the other end of the same slimy stick.

Arianna reported some time ago that conflation with telemarketers (they all call at dinnertime) was driving response rates down, thus compromising the accuracy of "random" samples. Let's finish the job. It doesn't take everybody to do this. Depriving pollsters of a certain cohort of the population -- like, say, readers of left-leaning blogs -- is enough.

And it's something you can actually do, by not doing.

Will it hurt? Can't say for sure, but, hey, it couldn't help.
UPDATE (1-10): To the commenters claiming that exit polls are a necessary corrective for a fraudulent vote, two things: one, this piece from the Daily Kos, which seems to invalidate the notion of vote-tampering in New Hampshire (http://dhinmi.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/10/02623/2264/85/434176),
and two: so that's why Gore and Kerry ended up winning? Using a flawed technology as a corrective for an allegedly flawed vote is like using a psychic to catch an embezzler.

Comments

[StephenSmoliar]

Indeed, they SHOULD be treated like telemarketers, which means that the first words out of my mouth (following their initial blabber), are, "If you cannot begin by saying, 'Am I interrupting anything?,' then I don't want to talk to you!" For the record I have already done this twice to the Gallup Organization, and it felt really good. My guess is that Old George understood respect for the people he tried to survey better than any of his successors ever will.

[Stuart]

Here's a poll I'd like to see:

Percentage of people who can identify real differences between proposed health care plans (to pick one topic), vs. percentages of those who know which candidate is currently "in the lead".

Nearly every media source is now leading (ledeing?) with polling data at the top of the front page, or hour. The exceptions are the Daily Show, Colbert Report, and LeShow.