Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1305625
12 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 1 NOVEMBER 2020 UNITED STATES PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION Why Americans are so enamoured with election polls US presidential election: The Republican pollster Frank Luntz warned on Twitter and elsewhere the other day that if pre-election polls in this year's presidential race are embar- rassingly wrong again, "then the polling industry is done." It was quite the forecast. While it is possible the polls will misfire, it's exceedingly un- likely that such failure would cause the opinion research in- dustry to implode or wither away. One reason is that elec- tion polls represent a sliver of a well-established, multibil- lion-dollar industry that con- ducts innumerable surveys on policy issues, consumer product preferences and other nonelec- tion topics. If opinion research were so vulnerable to election polling failure, the field likely would have disintegrated long ago, after the successive embarrass- ments of 1948 and 1952. In 1948, pollsters confidently – but wrongly – predicted Thom- as E. Dewey would easily unseat President Harry Truman. In 1952, pollsters turned cautious and anticipated a close race be- tween Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower won in a landslide that no poll- ster foresaw. "Predictive failure," I note in my latest book, "Lost in a Gal- lup: Polling Failure in U.S. Pres- idential Elections," clearly "has not killed off election polling." So what, then, accounts for its tenacity and resilience? Why are election polls still with us, despite periodic flubs, fiascos and miscalls? Why, indeed, are many Americans so intrigued by election polling, especial- ly during presidential cam- paigns? Illusion of precision The reasons are several, and not surprisingly tied to deep currents in American life. They embrace – but go well beyond – a simplis- tic explanation that people want to know what's going to happen. Patrick Caddell, the private pollster for President Jimmy Carter, spoke to that tenden- cy years ago, saying, "Everyone follows polls because everything in American life is geared to the question of who's going to win – whether it's sports or politics or whatever. There's a natural curiosity." More substantively, election polling projects the sense, or illusion, of precision, which holds considerable appeal in troubled times. A hunger for certain- ty runs deep, especially in journalism, where reporters frequently encounter ambi- guity and evasion. Since the mid-1970s, large news organ- izations such as The New York Times and CBS News have con- ducted or commissioned their own election polls. And reports of crude pre-election polls have been found in American news- papers published as long ago as 1824. These days, polls guide, drive and help fix news media nar- ratives about presidential elections. They are critical to shaping conventional wisdom about the competitiveness of those races. Public ignorant of polling flubs But polls have an uneven record in modern presi- dential elections – which, paradox- ically, has contrib- uted to their resil- ience. A m e r i c a n s are mostly o b l i v i o u s W. Joseph Campbell is Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of Communication W. Joseph Campbell In 1940, Gallup crowed about the accuracy of its polling in an ad in the newspaper industry publication Editor & Publisher