The Age of Non-Stop Polling
Today it seems that no politician can utter a thought until public views have been thoroughly canvassed and a decision made on which stance will earn the most support and/or antagonize the fewest people. Political parties now devote extensive resources to surveying the public. Sadly, the objective is not to identifying the underlying preferences of the majority of Canadians – something that Mackenzie King somehow seemed to do instinctively – but rather to identify small segments of the population that can be targeted with boutique policies or appropriate marketing of issues. This balkanization of the country is pursued in the hope that a party can attract enough “bits and pieces” to cobble together an election victory, as has been ably documented in Susan’s Delacourt’s book Shopping for Votes.
Polling becomes even more prevalent whenever an election draws near and this is already apparent even though the upcoming federal election is not scheduled until October 19. Nonetheless, “the race is on” and it is the horse race aspect that receives far too much media attention. Indeed, many of the polls are conducted for the media and then featured prominently in coverage of election prospects. Headlines trumpet the results of a poll, but those results can be affected or distorted by so many variables. What kind of sample was polled and how large was it? What questions were asked, and in what sequence? Were the answers obtained on the respondent’s doorstep (increasingly rare), in a phone conversation, or in cued responses to automated phone questions? The foundation for poll results can be quite shaky, which is another reason they should not be featured so often and so prominently.
If the media are only serving the customer, it’s time we changed our demands
In their defence, the media might respond that they are only giving the customers what they want. To what extent is this situation our own fault? Is our notoriously short attention span and our obsession with contests and winners and losers (reflected in reality TV shows ad nauseum) encouraging the kind of shallow and narrow media coverage that we now mostly receive?
If the media are responding to what the customer wants, why don’t we demand more in depth analysis about the substantive issues of the coming campaign and how the parties are addressing them? Where is the critical analysis of the spurious claim of the Conservative Party that it is a superior manager of our economy? How about a closer look at the numerous Liberal Party promises on democratic reform and the likelihood that they would be implemented? What about the NDP insistence that would provide moderate, stable government? One can only hope that once the election campaign is underway these sorts of issues will receive proper attention and that we will not be inundated with an endless parade of polling results. Otherwise, we may want to remember John Diefenbaker and to “let the dogs out.”