And I think polling has become less and less reliable over the years I've spent bitchin' about it.
And that makes some sense in the context of my nagging belief that we're heading into a corporate style plutocracy, so why would rich and powerful people not try to skew opinion by fucking with the polling? But that's an unhinged rant for another time.
An opinion poll is a snapshot of a moment in time. But it's a lagging indicator, which makes it a snapshot of a circumstance that's probably already changed. In a media environment that's been engineered to move quickly and break things, that moment is old news before the polling even starts.
- Somebody says or does something
- A pollster is put to work
- The questions are formulated
- The calls are made
- Data is compiled and processed and analyzed
- Media reports it out
All of that takes a fair amount of time - at least several days, if not weeks - and by the time it gets out to the general public, we're being apprised of information that could be a month or more out-of-date.
From the time Trump says or does something stupid, to the time we get word on how that plays with regular Americans, Trump will have said or done another hundred stupid things.
Flood The Zone works, and we're seeing it every day.
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