as I've already indicated. Polling numbers, therefore, aren't going to be an appropriate statistic to base any statement on.
At least, not if you are trying to make a point with me.
Personally, I believe that polls are driven and manipulated by the media, and are thus corrupt.
I am not the only person to question the validity, or the appropriate use, of polls.
From
Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They like and Why We Seem to Go along with Itby Justin Lewis
<snip>
The notion of a poll-driven body politic is plausible only because the media coverage of polls reflects the political agendas of elites. Polls that suggest the popularity of ideas of little interest to the leadership of the two main parties are deemed irrelevant to the day-to-day coverage of politics, while polls that tie public opinion to political elites—notably horse race polls—surface in abundance. The media thus produce a form of public opinion that is largely compatible with the elites who claim, most of the time, to represent the popular will, and it is from this narrow space that assumptions can be made about politicians drifting with the ebb and flow of the polls.
If the actual use of polls is more opportunistic, it is, in a sense, an acknowledgment of the nature of polling data. The idea that poll results are authentic expressions of a popular will has been criticized for some time, and yet the dominant manifestation of this critique in public discourse is one that turns it on its head. While the critical literature emphasizes the socially constructed quality of poll responses, the question we hear most often is, as the New York Times article puts it, “Who actually talks to pollsters and who does not?” In other words, all pollsters need to do is talk to the right mix of people and everything will be well. This is not to belittle the technicalities of sampling, but the size or composition of the sample does not mitigate the interpretative nature of the whole exercise. The most ambiguous forms of polling, I have suggested, are those with the largest sample. An election, after all, asks everyone a question whose meaning is highly contested and generates an answer that might spring from a variety of contradictory positions. As a consequence, general movements to the right or left in the broad mass of U.S. polling data are very poor predictors of presidential elections. As Murray Edelman argues, the meaning of elections often has less to do with opinion preference than with their broader role as rituals vindicating a political mainstream.
If the dominant meaning of polls is caught up in a set of interpretations that vivify the notion of representative democracy, an analysis of the polling data excluded from this interpretation prompts us to explore the conditions of this dominant construction. Although these conditions involve a corporate media whose interests are generally allied with the center-right preferences of political elites, the ideological practices that exclude discussion of polls to the left of a Washington consensus have their own momentum. Reporters are caught up in a set of professional ideologies that make it difficult to go beyond the confines of elite political frameworks and a set of broader ideologies that make it difficult to question the notion of representative democracy.
If polls are a form of representation, then the image of a moderate-to-conservative public reflecting the political range of its political leaders is a highly selective representation of those representations. My point here is not so much that the media misrepresent the “true” nature of a more left-leaning public, but that they limit the possibilities that the polling data offer us. This, of course, raises the question of what the opinions produced by polls really do mean, and it is this issue that is the subject of the second part of this book. http://www.questia.com/read/100075031#
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