Sebastian Butler Essays - Public Opinion, Survey Methodology

Sebastian Butler Mr. Hosman AP Government 28 October 2016 Public Opinion Polling Public opinion is defined as the views that are prevalent among the general public and Opinion poll is an assessment of public opinion obtained by questioning a representative sample. A poll is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample and they are designed to represent opinion of the population. They are used to determine and predict what people believe and how they feel about the topic and how they will react to it. It is a method used across all of America. A big question that people ask is should the American people trust these polls? I think it depends on the situation because sometimes these polls are helpful to people to see some results, but a big problem with this method of polling is that it isn't very accurate most of the time. I believe that public opinion polling is a curse to American politics. This is because it can make people change their mind on what candidate they are voting for because they see the polls and sometimes the polls shows false information. For example in 1948 Presidential election, the polls predicted for certain that victory for the Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey. Without waiting for the official count of all of the votes, newspapers all over America were claiming in their headlines, "Dewey defeats Truman." It was false information because Harry S. Truman became the 31st President of the United States. These can have big affects on campaigns. For example when Al Gore was running against George W. Bus h in the election of 2000. The news channels and media were all saying Bush won and then that Gore won and it just kept going back and forth because they were basing it off of the polls that they were receiving and a lot of people had not voted yet. Like in Florida because of the voting system in Florida that year was terribly set up and a lot of people voted for the wrong person when they were going to vote for Al Gore. George W. Bush ended up winning the election but Al Gore would have won if it weren't for the messed up polling system in Florida. That is just a big example of how it affects campaigns. A big weakness to public opinion polling which I agree is that the person taking the survey tend to pick the most popular answer because the interviewer tells them who the most popular choice that people have been picking and that is stupid because it is like changing the person's thoughts on who they were going to pick. An implication that public opinion polling has on democracy is that they are not always the most accurate facts. In conclusion, public opinion polling is commonly used across America and can be helpful to a lot of Americans. One thing that isn't too good about this is that it isn't very reliable information and affects how and who people vote for in an election. The fact that it messed up these big Presidential elections bad and it needs to be a little bit improved. Overall it is not that bad of a system to this day and it shows results that the people want to see during elections.