Against Polling

It's 90% Bullshit

Cicero Denounces Catiline, fresco by Cesare Maccari, 1882–1888

Data. Everybody wants data. We are supposedly in an age of data. Endless numbers. Information. Well, to me it’s all garbage.

Supposedly, the way you make a successful political campaign is that you go out and you ask people what they want, and then you make your message based on that. Except that’s bullshit. It doesn’t work. Politely put, the data-based approach to politics is based on a fallacious understanding of the world. Not so politely put, it’s a racket for political consultants so they can scam hapless hacks and wealthy donors.

Look at immigration. The numbers supposedly favored Trump so much that it was a mistake to attack him about the manifestly cruel process of deportations under his regime. Polling and punditry conspire to create one of those situations where “it would play into their hands.” On paper, you can see why: A majority of Americans once said they wanted less immigration and even to deport all illegal aliens. Now, Trump is underwater on immigration. What happened? Well, people saw what actually existing Trumpism looks like, and it’s ugly. It looks like a police state, because it is. And this brings us to the problem with issue polling. When you ask someone in a survey, "Should we deport illegal immigrants?" they are going to hear the word “illegal” and reason, “Well, yes, they did something wrong, it’s not fair.” On a very abstract level, it’s almost definitionally correct, tautological in its rational soundness: a person who is not supposed to be here should not be. Then come the actual images of what it looks like to realize that abstract equation, and people go, “Oh, no, this is awful.” Now the public likes immigrants again and wants them to have a path to citizenship rather than repression. (To make a grumpy point for wokeness or political correctness, this is why people wanted to say “undocumented” rather than “illegal,” because it suggests an administrative problem, not broad-based criminality.)

Should we castigate the public for a lack of imagination or common sense? No, the blame lies with lazy politicians and their craven advisers. The approach of issue polling and then building a campaign around it completely ignores the human faculties of judgement and imagination. It assumes that when people hear a question and answer it, they all mean the same thing and that thing reflects a shared empirical reality. They don’t, and it doesn’t. Everyone has very different images in their mind. The key is to put the right images in their mind, hopefully, good, inspiring, grand, and virtuous ones. Politicians need to go back to basics, to the oldest political skill: rhetoric, that is the art of combining reason with imagery that moves the emotions. Aristotle, who first systematized the study of rhetoric, characterized it as “the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion about any subject whatever.” I write “art” pointedly: it is not a science, it’s based on actual, practical experience, and it is learned by studying successful, concrete examples. A huge problem with the modern world, if you’ll permit me, is a confusion between arts and sciences: people try to apply scientific principles to the arts, and vice versa, with the result being a giant muddle.

You can try to study rhetorical appeals with polling, to see which “message” works, but again, that abstracts it from the larger whole: the entirety of the speech, the public audience being addressed, the historical moment. Ultimately, the worldview of the data guys is based on a giant mistake: there’s an objective world out there, and it doesn’t change. You grasp it with a technical means and then try to apply that objective knowledge. This will create constant befuddlement and surprise as the people don’t behave the way you want them to. This, in turn, will create pseudoscientific behavior like altering the theory to say you were always right and how this anomaly proves it if you look at it the right way. But politics is based on a fundamentally changing world: of opinions, of historical events, of the public’s feelings and imagination on issues. A great politician recognizes changing tides and gradually shapes their public: they go from speaking to a crowd to leading it. The way to learn how to do this used to be obvious: study the words and actions of politicians past, and try to get practical lessons. This is what the humanities teach: how to deal with the world of human affairs as it is, not as it’s been abstracted and dissected by the scientists. Study the classics and the modern imitators of the classics. Go back to an era before endless polling, when politicians were relying on the responses of their audience.

Now, you may say, “Well, you use polling to make your argument, so isn’t that a bit of a contradiction?” It’s part of getting a picture of the world. It is not the entirety of it. We are not in the Moneyball-era anymore. The statistical fixation of the early 21st century that’s made so many bad predictions and fathered so many puzzling defeats must be abandoned. We are not in an era of small calculations but of great movements. Politicians with a vision and a strong, clear rhetorical appeal, like Trump, Bernie, AOC, and now Mamdani, are those who excite people. People become disappointed and disillusioned when they lapse into focus-group-tested canting. Say something for a change.