Polling Quotes

“The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with 'image.' But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare and deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. And therein lies one of the most powerful influences of the television commercial on political discourse.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“Lucy's polls were sometimes kind of violent.”
― Charles M. Schulz, You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown

“A great pollster may have an ideology, but they must divorce it from his or her analysis or raw polling data. That is never to say a poll should cause a candidate to change a heartfelt position. Rather, it is a question of emphasis and deemphasis that must be examined.”
― Roger Stone, Stone's Rules: How to Win at Politics, Business, and Style

“But let us imagine what we would think of opinion polls if the questions came in pairs, indicating what people “believe” and what they “know” about the subject. If I may make up some figures, let us suppose we read the following: “The latest poll indicates that 72 percent of the American public believes we should withdraw economic aid from Nicaragua. Of those who expressed this opinion, 28 percent thought Nicaragua was in central Asia, 18 percent thought it was an island near New Zealand, and 27.4 percent believed that ‘Africans should help themselves,’ obviously confusing Nicaragua with Nigeria. Moreover, of those polled, 61.8 percent did not know that
we give economic aid to Nicaragua, and 23 percent did not know what ‘economic aid’ means.”
― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology