The AP reminds us that polls shape opinion as often as they reflect it

Modern political polling began with George Gallup, a man who believed it was possible to measure public opinion with mathematical and objective precision. The theory is that, if you carefully calibrate the people whom you query, balancing their identities and values, you can extrapolate from a small sample the beliefs of an entire nation. That theory has guided political polling in America for almost 80 years. But what ordinary people outside of politics and polling miss is that the questions determine the answers and that pollsters, through carefully framed questions, can shape, rather than reflect, public opinion.

A perfect example comes from AP, which announced today that half of U.S. adults think that Israel’s war against Hamas has “gone too far”:

Half of U.S. adults say Israel’s 15-week-old military campaign in Gaza has “gone too far,” a finding driven mainly by growing disapproval among Republicans and political independents, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Broadly, the poll shows support for Israel and the Biden administration’s handling of the situation ebbing slightly further across the board. The poll shows 31% of U.S. adults approve of Biden’s handling of the conflict, including just 46% of Democrats. That’s as an earlier spike in support for Israel following the Hamas attacks Oct. 7 sags.

This is precisely the polling result Joe Biden wants. His base despises Israel, so Biden is desperate to force Israel to cease combat operations against Hamas, an entity that has vowed to annihilate Israel and all her Jewish citizens. Indeed, the State Department is even floating the idea of rewarding Hamas for October 7 by recognizing a Palestinian state.

Image: The pollster by AI.

(As an aside, Secretary of State Antony Blinken loves to state as one of his alleged pro-Israel credentials the fact that his stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was a Holocaust survivor. That’s true. Pisar lost his parents and a sister to the Holocaust. Only ten years old when the Nazis invaded Poland, he survived the Majdanek, Bliżyn, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, and Dachau camps, slave labor in the Engelberg Tunnel, and a Death March. He was the only child from his Polish school of 900 who survived the war. I get the feeling that Blinken must have hated Pisar. That’s because it’s incomprehensible to me that someone so close to a Holocaust survivor would want to give Hamas, the modern Nazis, a state. But back to the main point.)

As Scott Adams astutely points out in a tweet about the AP poll, the poll, rather than truly revealing public opinion, reflects how polling is used to shape opinion or support political goals:

Learn to spot propaganda polls like this one.

If I ask you whether or not Israel “went too far,” your human impulse is to say yes without much critical thinking or comparing alternatives.

Imagine instead that I asked you to predict what happens to Israel later if it stops… https://t.co/Hjx1RY0B39

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) February 2, 2024

To illustrate more vividly the point Adams makes, let me take you back to a time when the BBC still produced valuable content that wasn’t completely overtaken by wokism and overt leftism. During an episode of Yes, Minister, which ran from 1980-1988, the character of Sir Humphrey Appleby, a savvy political player, graphically illustrates precisely how dishonest polling really is…or at least, can be:

The way to determine what the American people want and believe is through honest elections. And there almost certainly is some value to rolling polls that, over the years, keep asking the same questions about such things as people’s feelings about the economy or national security. But when it comes to very specific policies, always view polls with suspicion. As often as not, as Scott Adams says, their purpose isn’t to reveal information but, instead, to drive policy.