Gratton on polls

PETER WITH A FEW THOUGHTS spurred by my throwaway post on the CNN poll.

I think he’s right that you could probably get 2 or 3% to say yes to almost anything on a poll. There are the mentally ill, the highly eccentric, the people who don’t know English well and misunderstand the question, and of course the lippy contrarians who think it’s funny to say “yes” to obviously false or stupid options.

Which is why it was so amazing to me when in America a few years ago there was a poll on whether “telemarketers should regulate themselves” or “the government should prevent them from calling homes whenever they feel like it.” Something like 98% of people chose the second option, which for all intents and purposes is a unanimous vote against unharnessed telemarketing practices.

And I found myself wondering, how many other reasonably plausible questions would end up with 98% yeses? Not too many.

In Chicago I received a few garbage poll calls. One of them was from a group obviously hired to lobby in favor of a casino boat at Navy Pier (one of Daly’s pet projects, which never happened in the end). I was against that idea too, and the pollster was very obviously pushing and leading me so as to get a yes vote on the casino. And it ended up taking 20 or so minutes.

But I think the thing I really didn’t like in Chicago were the phone calls from the Fraternal Order of Police asking for donations. It always felt like a demand for protection money. That was a controversial operation, because they would give out car window stickers to anyone who had donated, thereby suggesting varying treatment from traffic violators who were or were not displaying such stickers. I don’t know if that’s still going on, but it was a bad thing from the start.