Today is September 24, 2015, but it might as well be July 2011.
Then as now, a small band of Congressional politicians held America’s financial health hostage to their political ideology. It was the first time the United States ran up against the debt ceiling, and our political leaders couldn’t agree to simply pay our bills.
We know the extremes on each side. One says the only solution is to tax the rich. The other says the only solution is to cut programs for the poor.
One thing is for sure. None of these guys knows how to spell. They think “compromise” is a four-letter word. It’s not even a four-syllable word.
So then, as now, political leaders berate compromise and threaten to do real harm to everyone, both here and abroad.
But then as now, that’s not how the American voting public sees it. Shamefully, our media, being addicted to conflict, rarely report that two-thirds of us believe that the solution is both spending cuts and tax increases. And so those of us in the middle feel like we have to make a false choice between extremes, neither of which we want
In July 2011, I started asking myself:
“In a representative democracy, if 70% of the voting public want something, why can’t they get it?”
I began looking at polling data to see where the majority of voters are at odds with the political and governmental systems we now have. It was a sobering reality check, because some of the majorities are huge. So I refined my question:
“If as many as 95% of voters want something, why can’t they get it?”
The most significant reason is money, specifically the money that corrupts our political processes. You don’t have to know much about American politics to know that political action committees have a far greater impact on public officials than do mere citizens. In the eyes of most politicians, it’s not the voters who count; it’s the people who pay for their campaigns. Donald Trump is exactly right in connecting the dots between money and access to decision-making.
So if you want to get an elected official’s attention, you have to cause either pleasure (usually in the form of money) or pain (usually in the form of bad publicity just before an election) or both. That’s what most political action committees do.
There is another big reason why the majority of voters can’t get the government we want, which is that we don’t trust our fellow citizens. Frankly, there are times when we are uneasy with a system where the ignorant, the poor, and the inattentive have the same rights of citizenship as the educated, the comfortable, and the informed.
In the big picture, there are two traditional responses to this dilemma. One – the Thomas Jefferson approach – is to make more of our citizens educated, comfortable, and informed. The other – the Karl Rove approach – is to make it harder and harder for certain segments of the population to vote.
In my opinion, the lack of faith embodied in the second response is distressing. Because there is a demonstrable ability of large numbers of people to get decisions right, even though those larger numbers contain some real outliers.
To illustrate this, I’ll cite an example in The Perfect Swarm: the Science of Complexity in Everyday Life, by Len Fisher. I’m quoting here from an interview on NPR’s “Science Friday” in 2010.
You just get a jar of jellybeans or something like that and get a whole group of people to guess how many are in the jar. Most of them will be miles out. The average will be terribly close. Again and again, it works really well. But the reason why it works is because the people are making up their minds independently and because you’ve got a diversity of opinion, and those two are the absolute keys to making swarm intelligence work. It’s independence and diversity. So long as you’ve got that and maintained that, then you get good decisions with those sorts of problems.
In other words, I may not be able to trust Joe as an individual to guess how many beans are in a jar of jelly beans, but I can trust you as a group. Which is why it’s OK – even a good thing – to include everyone when seeking the right answer. Excluding outliers in either direction will skew the result and take the group farther from the truth.
But this is not just about jelly beans in a jar.
Trusting diverse, independent public opinion also works on huge problems like estimating the number of refugees flowing from Syria, whether North Korea will launch a multi-stage missile before a certain date, and whether Russia will enter part of Ukraine before a certain date.
These are actual examples of predictions that groups of ordinary citizens have made in a scientific study conducted by the Good Judgment Project. In some cases, these ordinary citizens using nothing more sophisticated than a Google search have done a better job of predicting events than experts using classified information.
How does this work? The Good Judgment Project chooses 3,000 citizens and asks them to predict world events in carefully worded questions. Satisfying Fisher’s diversity requirement, the 3,000 have widely varied backgrounds, circumstances, occupations, ages, etc.
They also are independent and anonymous. Apart from those conducting the research, no one knows who they are, not even the other 3,000 people in the study.
Back to Pennsylvania politics, about two-thirds of us know that solving our fiscal problems and meeting the core duties of government will require raising taxes as well as cuts in spending. But our legislative leaders seem to be oblivious to what people want. They are, of course, being paid to be oblivious by special interests.
How can legislators get away with this? Because they have rigged the system such that there’s virtually no chance an ignored public can hold their lawmakers accountable. I’m talking mostly about gerrymandering, although there are other techniques.
To understand the citizen-hostile practice of gerrymandering, think about an election year. In the primary, voters in each political party choose a candidate for the general. In the general, voters at large choose their public officials.
Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives has 203 districts with an election occurring every two years. In 2014, exactly two districts met that definition of an election. That is, in only two districts out of 203 did both Republicans and Democrats give voters a choice in their respective primary elections as well as in the general election.
That’s less than 1%, which is why I didn’t ask you to guess. No one in their right mind would think this is how representative democracy should work. But there you have it, and it won’t get better as long as lawmakers are allowed to draw their own legislative districts.
One other point to ponder. In last year’s general election, 108 of the 203 House districts (53%) had just one name on the ballot. Among the other 95, only 21 districts had a margin of victory less than 60%.
So even where voters theoretically have a choice, the deck has been stacked one way or the other so as to make elections meaningful in only a handful of districts. Please remember this when a lawmaker claims his party has a mandate. This is not the stuff of mandates. It is the stuff of madness and subversion of democracy.
When politicians become so entrenched and so purchased by special interests, the public interest – as expressed by the public itself – is ignored.
Government of, by and for the people becomes a quaint idea rather than the bedrock upon which a great nation was built.
Well, it doesn’t do much good to know what the voting public wants if there’s no effort to get it enacted. That’s the next part of this discussion. How can we make sure that elected officials pay attention?
The short answer is to become informed consumers of public opinion surveys and discuss them among your circle.
But whose polls can you trust? There’s that word again: trust.
There are national standards that govern legitimate public opinion research. They are established by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, AAPOR. Among other things, those standards require the release of an entire poll, not just parts of it, and require disclosure of who paid for the poll. Other standards deal with such things as sample size, the number of cell-phone-only households in the survey, and bias in how questions are worded or issues are presented.
If a poll doesn’t meet AAPOR standards, I ignore it. I won’t trust anything it says because usually I can get trustworthy data elsewhere. In Pennsylvania, both Franklin & Marshall and Muhlenberg College have long-established polling operations that meet AAPOR standards. They are one click away on my computer, and you can do the same whenever you want to know what Pennsylvania voters really think.
The easiest way to check a poll is by going to the web site of the organization publicizing it. If you can’t easily find a link to the actual poll and all relevant information about how it was conducted, click no more. And consider whether you should trust that organization’s information about anything else.
Why else should we trust legitimate public opinion research? Let’s move into the private sector for a minute.
I’m willing to bet that there is no nation whose economy is informed as much by public opinion research as the United States. Corporations spend fortunes to learn consumer preferences for colors, shapes, textures, sizes, smells, and materials to market everything from cars to cat litter.
How else do we have a choice of – are you ready? – 75 brands of cat litter with sales in the billions? How else do manufacturers appeal to the natural clay market, or the synthetic market? Or figure out the right color and fragrance of the odor-fighting crystals? Or decide to call them crystals for that matter?
The cost of public opinion research is substantial, but businesses pay it because the insights gained are priceless. A product’s share of the market can rise or fall based on how quickly companies respond to or anticipate what customers want. You can bet that Volkswagen right now is writing a blank check for help in restoring the public’s opinion about the integrity of the company and the cars it manufactures. It will be interesting to watch.
Back to politics, it’s the rare candidate for public office above the level of township supervisor who does not rely on public opinion polls. County commissioners all the way up to Presidents use opinion research to know what they should talk about, when to talk about it, what to say, and what not to say, depending on what kind of voters they are working to persuade, who also are identified by public opinion research.
The ultimate question here is this: Are the corporations and candidates who spend untold billions on public opinion research each year wasting their money?
I don’t think so either. Public opinion research today is a science on which human and financial fortunes depend. We can know with a high degree of confidence what voters think and want their commercial, civic, and political climates to be. And we can act on that vision.
Another good question is why politicians rely on public opinion polls to get elected but then tell us polls can’t be trusted when it comes to governance. The hypocrisy is palpable and predictable.
An example of the power of public opinion that has pundits shaking their heads is how fast opinion flipped on the issue of same-sex marriage. Some say it had to do with the demographic shift of younger people gaining numbers and power with a different approach to life. Some say it had to do with LGBT individuals becoming more visible in their communities. Some say it had to do with an understanding that the rights of citizenship must be equal for all citizens. Some say it finally became safe for heterosexuals to express their support for same-sex couples without being looked at with suspicion.
It’s all of the above. There have been dozens of polls in this Century on the issue of same-sex marriage, and the pattern is clear to see. Acceptance by the majority was a long time coming, but when it came it came with real force, the kind of force that compels governmental institutions – governors, judges, lawmakers – to concur.
That can happen on other issues, such as medical marijuana that more than 80% of us support, and I suspect it will. Predictably, however, our political leadership will not lead and will be among the last to follow public opinion.
Personally, I believe that the refusal of political leaders to make policy decisions based on legitimate public opinion is utterly un-American. I see purposeful, open, independent, public opinion research as a way to put representation back in representative democracy and the public back in public service.
A former reporter in the Capitol News Room dismissed public opinion research in a conversation we had a few years ago. He claimed that elections tell us all we need to know about what the public wants.
That’s so wrong. When we vote for a candidate, we vote for everything the candidate stands for, whether we know what that is or not. Yet it’s the rare voter who agrees 100% with his preferred candidate. Everyone I know has problems with the elected officials they voted for. (When I was a public official, I sometimes had problems with myself!) And that’s because sometimes we vote for people despite their position on some issues when we agree with them about issues that are more important to us.
That’s one way in which public opinion research gives us a better understanding of popular will than elections. It allows us to have different opinions about different issues instead of an all-or-nothing choice between two human beings who are largely mysterious.
There are a few other things wrong with elections as a way to measure public opinion about issues.
- Too few candidates and issues being addressed, above.
- The fact of Election Day.
- The decision takes place on a single day.
- The closer it gets, the wilder the claims and counterclaims become, and the more bewildered and demoralized voters become.
- The facts onElection Day.
- Lines at the polls
- Weather
- Confusion about ID
- Charges of irregularities
- Machine malfunctions
- One-vote victories
Public opinion research includes everyone with all sorts of opinions. Although researchers use a sample, experience has produced ways to choose samples that truly represent the public at large.
For public opinion research, any day can be Election Day. We don’t know whether we’ll get a call; or when we’ll get a call; or what someone may be calling about. So instead of being forced to make a final decision on a given day, we form an opinion over a much longer period of time, remaining open to new information, instead of running the gauntlet to vote and then forgetting about it for another two years.
For those who favor transparency, this means that debate about issues takes place in the light of day, not in private parlors. Why? Because the only way to change public opinion is by public debate.
It also means that advocates can’t target their spending on a specific day. They have to make their arguments over a longer period of time, which allows the victims of unfair attacks to present the truth in time to matter.
With public opinion research, there are no lines at the polls. Researchers use random dialing for registered voters, which prevents bias in who gets called. Just as important, it deals only with individuals who have proven their identity when they registered to vote.
If any of you are not registered to vote, do it now. Today or tomorrow. Because Pennsylvania is voter-hostile, in two weeks you won’t be able to.
That same reporter had a fallback opposition.
“This is really government by referendum!”
Not at all.
When does a referendum take place? On Election Day. Which means that a referendum has all of the problems of an election – outrageous false advertising, long lines, and one-vote victories, etc.
Not so fast, the reporter says.
“Why do we need public officials? If all they do is follow public opinion, it doesn’t matter who does it.”
Following public opinion does not make elected officials superfluous. Knowing what the majority wants, it is still the job of elected officials to decide the harder question of how to achieve it.
Citizens can identify the destination, and their elected officials can be held accountable for finding the way. This allows public officials to exercise their considerable knowledge of complex issues while remaining faithful to the ultimate wishes of the public.
My bottom line for today:
Trust and promote our collective wisdom.
Verify each claim’s legitimacy.
Tell your lawmakers to represent the public faithfully.
And by all means, vote.