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At Last, the Perfect Opinion Poll John L. Perry But first, this from the latest issue of The East Overshoe (W. Va.) Weekly Bugle: Pollster Forks Self to Death In what Sheriff R.B. (Buster) Fentress describes as "a weirdo accident," a stranger to these parts was discovered Thursday last, face down flat on the floor of Russell Ogle's barn, out there on Six Mile Creek Road by the old Jamison place, impaled through the abdomen onto the prongs of a turned-up pitchfork. The body was identified as belonging to the late Rosswell I. Plotkin of Washington, D.C., in the nation's capital. Law enforcement over there said the deceased had been in the employ of one of those big opinion-polling businesses that tells us what everyone in the country thinks about everything. Sheriff Fentress said Willie Wynette, who tenant-farms on the Ogle place and found the remains when he came to the barn to sharpen a scythe, mentioned there was a ruffled barn owl being held tight in the clutches of the dead man. Willie pried the fowl loose from the fingers and saw it flutter back up and light on the ridge pole of the barn.
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Willie said he recognized the owl as the same one that regularly roosts there and helps keep down the rodent population.
Ross Plotkin knew the opinion-peddling industry to which he had devoted his career was a flaming fantasy and growing worse by the day. As senior statistician and vice president for data-adjustment of the One-Poll-Fits-All Public Opinion Research and Analysis Group, Ross had seen right through it from the day he obtained his MBA. Two decades in the business had done nothing to elevate his confidence in flexible statistics. The first thing that began sticking in his craw was that wishy-washy "plus or minus 3 percentage points." With the silly little ± symbol, Ross could make any poll, however bogus, sound almost believable.
Margin of What? Leftwing mass-comm clients paid considerable fees for his polls. The operative words in the hokum he sold them were "margin of error" – as in ± 3 points, usually in very small print. If one of his polls stated that 34 percent of Americans felt so-and-so about something, ± 3 meant it could go as low as 31 or as high as 37 percent. The irony, bordering on outright fraud, was that for there to be a margin of error of any amount there first had to be a finite, certain percentage from which a margin of error could be measured. And if that percentage was already known to exist, and was known to be what it was, who needed a poll? Obviously, somebody had to be making up, after the fact, what the known, yet unknown, percentage was. And what was that percentage to be? Why, of course, a percentage varying no more, no less than ± 3 percentage points from the percentage the client wanted to hear. E Unum Pluribus Another thing that caused Ross to cringe was the other small-print number that accompanied his poll results – the number of persons polled. Sometimes it was as low as 501, or other times as high as 1,011. The public was expected to believe that by placing a nuisance telemarketing call to 501 persons, or even to 1,011, a pollster could tell what "the American people" were thinking. By recent count there were at least 295,734,134 of those Americans. Let's say 42 percent were polled as thinking so-and-so, with a margin of error of ± 3 points (that's 39 percent to 45 percent). That's supposed to mean somewhere between 115,336,312 and 133,080,360 Americans actually hold that same opinion? If 501 people were polled, then each one of those is supposed to represent – accurately, mind you – 590,268 other Americans who presumably hold the identical opinion on the question asked. If the number of persons polled was 1,011, then each presumably represents 292,517 other Americans with identical views on the question. Details, Details Sure, sure, not all of those 295,734,134 Americans are alive or adults or literate or out of jail or ever voted, but you get the point: It gives the pollsters just that much more leeway to horse around with reality. Even so, this numbers game has become a laughable myth that elite denizens of the Beltway worship as gospel, since it strokes their prejudices. Ross thought of his wife. He'd known that woman for decades and still hadn't figured her out. She'd say one thing one day and the next day insist she had meant just the opposite. Ross wondered how many polled persons were like his Zelda. He shuddered to think that even a single other person's mind worked anything remotely like hers – let alone 34 percent of 295,734,134, ± 3 percent. And, he thought, he and the other pollsters called themselves social scientists! They got away with this statistical sleight of hand because no one in the left-wing news media wanted to challenge the so-called scientific findings because Ross and the boys knew what answers the clients wanted and gave them what they wanted, by the numbers. "You're not going to stay in business selling refrigerators to Eskimos or Bibles to al Qaeda." Ross liked to say. Logic, Schmlogic, Who Cares? There once was a time when young reporters were instructed always to write about such-and-such percent "of those polled." It was a firing offense to say, "Public opinion today was … ." Now that most newspapers, magazines and television news outlets are corporate captives of leftists, they blurt such nonsense as "34 percent of Americans believe" something or other. Classic logical fallacy: substituting some for all – in this instance, deliberately. Ross' worst nightmare was when his poll and a competitor's on a closely related topic came up with significantly different percentages. It just wouldn't do to have one poll finding "34 percent of Americans" thinking one thing and a competitor's poll finding "55 percent of Americans" thinking substantially the same thing. Result: Polls had to be carefully worded, timed, targeted, weighted, adjusted and just plain outrageously jiggered to keep the differences from becoming too obvious. It was enough to give a person the hives. Then a light bulb went on in Ross' brain. (Or, some would later say, his mind must have snapped.) The way out of this horror movie was right there before him all the time – the blasted little ±. Instead of trying to get the ± factor down as low as possible (or believable), he should be inflating it – preposterously, the more preposterously the better. Aha! The All-Purpose Poll Ross hit upon the obvious. He would claim for his polls a margin of error not of ± 3 points but of ± 100 points. How could he lose? No matter what his "actual" percentage number for an answer might be, with a ± 100 points margin of error he couldn't go wrong. Whatever he reported, with a ± 100 points margin of error his percentage would always land somewhere between zero and 100 percent. Perfect! Who could question that? Think about it. This, in turn, meant it didn't really matter what percentage he reported. With ± 100 points always his margin of error, he would always be covered. He could stick whatever number he wanted in there. Let his competitors sweat that. Then another dim bulb incandesced. Why cook the stats on what people are supposed to be thinking today? Instead, offer polls predicting what they should be thinking tomorrow, next month, next year. Ross recalled having read how ancient Romans foretold the future. They hired some charlatan schlepp like him to slice open an owl and read its entrails. Who could possibly dispute that? In Quest of Wisdom Ross needed an owl, not a stuffed one, an owl with innards intact. He rose well before dawn and began driving westward out of Washington, looking for farms with barns. Barns, he reasoned, had to have barn owls. West of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Ross spied such a farm with a barn. Its roof was a sign: "See Rock City." He parked and approached. The barn he chose was home to a proprietary-minded ram whose cottage industry was to perpetuate the good life in the company of a couple of dozen winsome ewes. Ross advanced closer, wriggling his way through and over the flock toward the barn. The ram reached the opinion he might have competition and charged, head down, battering Ross all the way back to his car. Not at all discouraged, Ross pulled into the next farm and, taking no chances, circled the barn to enter from the rear. Inside, waiting with a .22 rifle loaded with mustard shot was the farmer, intent on shooting rats that feasted on his shelled corn. An Indication of Inhospitality When the farmer saw the city slicker, who resembled a traveling salesman he'd run off the property a week before, he fired, missed and hollered, not having revised his opinion, "I done told you to keep away from my daughter!" Now more determined than ever, though breathing hard, Ross tried the next farm. Luck was with him, at least at the outset. No one seemed home. Inside the barn, he spotted a fine specimen of a barn owl, perched regally on the ridge pole, eyes shut, napping. Ross climbed a rickety ladder to the rafters and began warily making his way toward the owl, who came awake just a little late. He had the resentful owl in his grasp, amid a lot of hooting and flapping. That was when Ross lost his footing but gained notoriety (± 100) in The East Overshoe (W. Va.) Weekly Bugle.
Without even the benefit of entrails of owls, pollsters are today still issuing public-opinion surveys that purport to prove conclusively the American people have lost confidence in George W. Bush and want to surrender and flee from Iraq. There are also – all across America – plenty of wise owls the pollsters never seem to find who, in their guts, have the opposite feeling and don't give a hoot for opinion polls. John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com. Read John Perry's columns here.
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