Direct Headline: The Polling Crisis Is a Catastrophe for American Democracy
If public-opinion data are unreliable, we’re all flying blind.
By David A. Graham The Atlantic November 4, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/polling-catastrophe/616986/
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The polling industry is busted. It's not the external numbers the average citizen sees, but it's the internal analytics that are bought, sold and traded that are completely unreliable.
You can't create a culture where half of America is told they will be catalogued, listed and then eventually doxxed to get them fired from their jobs/careers and socially ostracized for "wrong think"
And they see evidence of this all the time in the national press. Alexi McCammon was fired from a high profile editor position for something she wrote years and years before, that didn't even happen on her watch, since she was fired nearly after she was hired and before she actually took the post. Why? Her ex boyfriend is TJ Duckloo, who was worked for Jen Psaki's staff and was caught threatening a female reporter and using derogatory language at her. Duckloo wasn't originally fired until pressure mounted. ( In this regard, while I believe Duckloo should have been immediately fired, since it was actually related to his job, I don't blame Psaki. She was trying to defend her employee and at some level I understand the urge to want to defend your own people. That's a natural inclination to being a boss, not just partisan politics) Since Duckloo getting cancelled wasn't enough, they went after his then girlfriend.
And this isn't the only example.
No one will talk to pollsters, take surveys and be part of focus groups if they see people getting cancelled all the time for violating the Identity Politics Playbook.
Keep in mind that McCammon is both minority and a woman and her then boyfriend worked for the Biden Administration and even that didn't protect him.
She had to pay for whom she was associated with so the deep digging into her life had to happen.
Lots of Conservatives/Republicans won't talk to pollsters. Some ( and I don't agree with it because silence is better) choose to simply lie to make the numbers more cooked, in part I believe, to tank the polling industry.
Here's the reality, even when done right and it's very difficult to get right,
polling is a "snapshot" of public sentiment, not something that creates an absolute.