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"'Pollsters and pundits" has become a dismissive epithet in modern politics. Pollsters, at least, deserve much better.
AS THE VOTES WERE COUNTED ON THE NIGHT OF THIS past January's New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary, pollsters and other professionals in the political game began to grapple with an uncomfortable fact: Virtually all of them had been dead wrong. Despite unanimous poll results predicting a Barack Obama victory (by an average of eight points) on the heels of Senator Obama's surprising triumph in the Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton was going to emerge the winner.
The New Hampshire debacle was not the most significant failure in the history of public-opinion polling, but it joined a list of major embarrassments that includes the disastrous Florida exit polling in fhe 2000 presidential election, which prompted several networks to project an Al Gore victory, and the national polls in the 1948 race, which led to perhaps the most famous headline in US. political history: "Dewey Defeats Truman.'' After intense criticism for previous failures and equally intense efforts by pollsters to improve their techniques, this was not supposed to happen.
New Hampshire gave new life to many nagging doubts about polling and criticisms of its role in American politics. Are polls really accurate? Can surveys of small groups of people give a true reading of what a much larger group thinks? What about bias? Don't pollsters stack the deck?
At a deeper level, the unease about polling grows out of fears about its impact on democracy. On the strength of exit polls in the 1980 presidential election, for example, fhe TV networks projected a Ronald Reagan victory- and Jimmy Carter conceded- even though people in fhe West still had time to vote. Critics charged that this premature call may have literally stopped some westerners from taking the trouble to cast their ballots. There is alsoamore generalized suspicion that polls (and journalists) induce political passivity by telling Americans what they think. As the New Hampshire story unfolded on January 8, former television news anchor Tom Brokaw seemed to have this idea on his mind when he said, with a bit of exasperation, that professional political observers should simply "wait for fhe voters" instead of "making judgments before fhe polls have closed and...