Partisan Polling
Here’s another example of why I’m losing faith in polling…and in the entities that breathlessly report results.
The Des Moines Register/Mediacom/Your Name Here Iowa Poll was conducted within the past week, and results are being parceled out in the newspaper day by day. Today, a story indicating that the races in Iowa’s four congressional districts are very close. When asked if you would tend to vote for a Democrat or a Republican for Congress, 47 percent say Democrat and 45 percent Republican…a narrowing of the gap from when the question was asked in June, when Democrats led 47-42.
But it is an entirely worthless question, based solely upon the presumption that people vote based solely on party label. That sort of question plays right into a shallow definition of governing as merely a battle between two political parties, with no regard for the human beings who are the named candidates on the ballot.
The Iowa Poll shows that in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd districts, voters favor an unnamed Democrat over an unnamed Republican…glad I was sitting down when I read that, since the voter registration numbers in those districts show the very same thing. Another stunner…the unnamed Republican beats the unnamed Democrat in the 4th district, where more real live voters identify themselves as Republican than Democrat.
This late in the game, two weeks before early voting starts in Iowa and six weeks before election day, there’s no excuse for not doing a poll with the names of the candidates. And if such a poll was done…why not release those results?
A couple of possible reasons…maybe that’s part of the water torture the paper seems to love, to get clicks and readers with a new poll-related snippet each day, and the candidate-based polling is to come. Or maybe they did do candidate-based polling, but it didn’t go the way some at the paper wanted, so these “generic” poll numbers are released because they fit the paper’s narrative.
Regardless…the generic candidate poll is basically worthless, and I’m sorry to have spent two minutes on it here…other than as a caution to not be fooled just because something once known as “the newspaper Iowa depends upon” does a story about it.
