Polling, why is it so bad?

Its election cycle, and as you know in this day and age with every poll that comes out and plethora of headlines and stories will be written about it, because polling apparently is now a replacement for news.. and has been for a long long time now during election season. Every new poll will be reported both professionally and among the punditry as either the end of days, or the greatest news ever to come about, depending on where in the political spectrum the pundit lies and whether their candidate is up or down.

Polling has its place, it certainly CAN capture trends, but polling in the modern era, particularly poling for public consumption, is a wholly different animal. I learned this lesson decades ago. At the time I was running a small news site, and I commissioned personally poll on one of the lesser known republican candidates running in their primary just to see what sort of numbers I got. It was mainly an experiment by me, I had no intention of ever releasing the results, and was simply curious where this person actually stood. Given they were never going to be an actual serious threat to win the nomination, I was curious what polling about this individual would come back as. I found a pollster, told them what I wanted, paid them their money and waited… a week or so later, I got the results and I probably poured over them for the next few days in my spare time. I began to realize early on that the polling was not indeed biased toward the candidate I had hired them to inquire about. The wording of the questions, the ordering of the questions, the sampling breakdown, all showed to me at least, they they “knew where their bread was being buttered” and wanted to give me results I would like. Now understand this poll was not a high dollar poll, I was not a national news organization, I don’t honestly even remember exactly how much I spent but I can assure it was at most in the 4 figure range at the time.

HamiltonJay….