Quotes About Polls

Two years later, the New York Times and CBS released a joint poll—the first media-made poll. Critics pointed out that, ethically, the press, which is supposed to report news, can't also produce it, but media-run polls exploded all the same.62

In 1972, political scientist Leo Bogart demonstrated that most of what polls do is manufacture opinion, given that a sizable portion of Americans know nothing or nearly nothing or else hold no opinion about the subjects and issues raised. "The first question a pollster should ask," Bogart wrote, is "' Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion?

The same thing happened after Donald Trump won the presidency. There was a huge outcry about the polls being wrong. Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, drew a lot of that criticism. But he never said Clinton was a sure thing. Based on his aggregation and weighting of polling data, he had Trump between 30% and 40% to win (approximately between two-to-one and three-to-two against) in the week before the election. An event predicted to happen 30% to 40% of the time will happen a lot.

Despite the administration's long public information campaign, for many months polls have consistently indicated only 37 percent of those eligible for Medicare say they only partially understand the program.

America is inundated with polls. We need a term for being swamped with polls. I would say 'poll-arized,' but that's already in use to describe our political divisions.

We believe - most polls indicate - a lack of support, a lack of confidence in the ability of the Congress to work. That is disturbing in terms of our general democracy.

Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?

The total collapse of the public opinion polls shows that this country is in good health. A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people's minds would be uninhabitable.

The bottom line is: Polls can be provocative, informative, fun or maddening. But as we move into 2020, it's important to be mindful that news organizations or those interpreting their polling results may not always be providing context that would allow us to have the most complete and accurate picture of the public's mood at a given moment.

Journalists should denounce government by public opinion polls.

The polls and the pundits and the media seem to talk to each other. It's sort of like an echo chamber.

Pundits talk as if polls are always right, but if they were, pundits wouldn't have jobs.

They may then be willing to cast principled votes based on an educated understanding of the public interest in the face of polls suggesting that the public itself may have quite a different understanding of where its interest lies.

I always lose the election in the polls, and I always win it on election day.

The polls told us that Hillary Clinton was going to win, and she didn't. I wasn't fooled by the polls.

The winner of the elections which saw the participation of almsot 30 million people was the Iranian nation and the losers were those who tried to keep people away from the polls.

I never felt comfortable with making political decisions based on whether, you know, it was the right thing to do in terms of a poll.

He is concerned by polls showing that Americans' support for the First Amendment—which guarantees the constitutional right to free expression—is waning, especially among younger Americans, who are increasingly intolerant of dissenting opinion. Grygorenko sees this as a sign that society prefers the false peace of conformity to the tensions of liberty. To grow indifferent, even hostile, to free speech is suicidal for a free people.

Although we've been authoritatively informed that a majority of Americans support a "pathway to citizenship," approximately five hundred times in the last two years alone, according to a quick Nexis search,18 that is a lie. This is part of the media's campaign to convince Americans they're nuts for preferring not to turn America into Mexico. Polls are irrelevant if you lie to the people being polled.

If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston and navigating with geocentric maps. [Criticizing Richard Dawkins]

When polled on Donald Trump's agenda, though pluralities of young people oppose his policies on immigration and healthcare, there is one issue where Trump's position wins outright majority support, even among young Democrats: trade.

Whether wisely or not, one of the first priorities of the incoming Obama administration was to present a package of healthcare benefits, which, to no one's surprise, produced an uproar in Congress and an assortment of polls declaring that the majority of Americans were opposed to it.

Nearly all Americans felt they knew JFK intimately, his charm and wit regularly lighting up the television screen at home. This is why polls showed that millions of Americans took his assassination like a 'death in the family.'

Being a skeptical and thoughtful consumer of polls is essential.