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​DOYLE: Polling or trolling?

The news media should not base its inclusion of candidates in debates on primary polling data

Polls have become too important in this election cycle. The candidates who can participate in debates are determined solely by polls, and no network has announced a method that does not use polls. These polls can have a real impact, with candidates who are left out of the primetime debate reaching 18 million fewer viewers. Using polls to decide who gets into the debates is an inherently flawed system and needs to be replaced by a more democratic model.

Poll numbers are not facts; they’re merely good guesses. Polls taken just weeks apart rarely get the same results and there is normally a significant margin of error. Candidates are separated by less than 3 percent at times, well within the margin of error. This means a candidate might be polled as being in fourth place but could actually be anywhere from second to sixth. With polls sometimes having sample sizes of only a couple hundred people, only a handful of responses actually determine a candidate’s standings.

The only hope the networks can have in the face of this ambiguity is that the various polls cancel out each other’s errors, creating some sort of consensus. To me this seems like a weak hope. The polls that are supposed to cancel each other out use wildly different methods of data collection and sample sizes. Just calling a collection of these polls a consensus is a gross misrepresentation. Networks do put a great deal of effort into making sure the polls used to decide debate eligibility are as accurate as possible, but using any collection of polls is always going to be a leap of faith. Do we want one of the most important aspects of our political process to be determined on a leap of faith?

Even the people who are creating these polls think they are being misused. Pollsters point out that “primary polls have very little predictive power when it comes to the general election.” Polls as a predictive tool are too intensely focused on the present moment, ignoring the big picture — to our detriment. Prominent polling institutions Gallup and Pew have opted not to take any primary polls out of a concern for a lack of accuracy. Many pollsters also point out that polling accurately is becoming harder with the growth of cell phones and the decline of people willing to answer a survey.

While polls might not be accurate enough to predict a winner this early on in the race, they can create losers and end up turning the race into a media grabbing circus. Candidates can easily be forced out of the race as their numbers drop and public confidence wanes. Texas Gov. Scott Walker’s recent exit from the race was in large part because of a drop in the polls. To boost poll number candidates have to make headlines — name recognition matters a great deal. This becomes self-fulfilling as the media gets to decide who gets the attention which then helps to determine who gets into the debates. In this way, the networks get to encourage more news while also being seemingly impartial in the selection of debaters.

We should not encourage candidates to grab for headlines, we should encourage them to speak about policy and goals. I understand ranking candidates in popularity is an attractive way to qualify them for a debate but it is also limits the discourse in the debates. The current system rewards the inflammatory statements of Carson and Trump while brushing aside less controversial candidates like Bush, who is struggling despite many advantages.

I propose everyone who is running should be allowed to participate in the debate on equal footing. With so many candidates the debate might have to be separated into two nights, placing more burden on the viewers. However, this would shift the focus away from who is the most popular to what the candidates are saying. I understand this would give more power to fringe candidates but I don’t think that's a particularly bad thing. Giving more people a better platform on which to make their points will give voters a better perspective on what these candidates think. However, as long as the debates are organized around a pecking order candidates will try to move up in the polls with immediacy, despite the long term consequences. I’m not proposing that this small shift will rid the American media of its obsession with who’s in the lead — but at least for one night all candidates could stand equal in front of the American people and make their best case for why they should be the next president.

Bobby Doyle is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at b.doyle@cavalierdaily.com.

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