Why Polls Mean Absolutely Nothing

If you have cable news television then the odds are that you've been bombarded with poll results since forever. The thought is that the best way to gauge the stance of the nation or a group of people on a certain position is to simply ask them how they feel about it. These results are held up probably, usually used to help back a stance that a particular analyst or pundit has taken or to better describe how something is going. However, with the way questions are asked, where the people are polled and everything else that goes into a poll it becomes more and more obvious as to why polls mean absolutely nothing when it comes to the state of the nation and its people.

The old adage is that you can make statistics say whatever you want. For the most part, this is absolutely true. No matter what demographic you're polling or surveying, the manipulation of the questions that are being posed can easily skew the answer into one's favor or outside of one's favor. The demographic itself can also be used to gain the favored result. Viewers of Fox News and MSNBC, based on the volatile history the two networks share, will probably differ.

The method used to avoid criticism by in-house poll is to use a Gallup poll as a tool. However, even as nearly every news outlet mentions these polls which have been historically accurate, where is the validity when both sides of an argument manage to use the same poll to further their analysis? The information may be correct but there's nothing that prevents them from being manipulated in order to fit an agenda's standards. So, how are you to determine how the nation feels on a given topic when polls are constantly being manipulated?

It's actually rather simple: you don't.

The fact of the matter is that polls will always be used to gauge the state of voters, the nation on critical issues and everything else that comes to mind. The poll, however, has the fundamental flaw in that it asks a single question that can be interpreted in a single manner. Surveys on the other hand, which in-depth and made to cover broad and specific strokes, can be used to determine a person's particular stance on a subject.