Snap Polls Stop Talking Heads

I have something good to say about polls this morning.

Normally, I dislike polls and poll-watching. Tracking Gallup and Rasmussen is like watching the scoreboard at a football game, instead of the action in front of you. Worse, it's like watching multiple scoreboards at a game, with each scoreboard purporting to report on the same action, but each reporting different scores. They swagger into the room full of concrete factuality and then change shape overnight. They are untrustworthy and distracting.

But polls are not half as untrustworthy and distracting as post-debate spinmeisters on television. Nothing on earth could shake these determined partisans from declaring their favored candidate as the winner. If one candidate had soiled himself and admitted that he tortures kittens, these scurrilous asses would soberly intone that it was a great moment, and that it was a brilliant outreach to American dog lovers. The first 15 minutes of coverage after a debate are a stomach-churning display of lying scumbags willing to say absolutely anything to make it seem like their candidate won.

Snap polls, though, are changing the role of post-debate spin, and that's a good thing. In past years, the partisans who spoke loudest and most enthusiastically in the locker rooms were declared the winners. 8 short years ago, Gore was declared the loser of a debate that surveys showed he had won, all because the Republican spinmeisters did a masterful job of arguing that the American people were more concerned with sighs than substance. The day of the snap poll, with results charting average voters' instant reactions to the debate available within minutes of the debate's close, had not yet arrived.

Snap polls are the silver lining to the cloud of election polls. They actually stand for something, because they measure a real reaction to a real phenomenon. Election polls, on the other hand, are pitched differently - they are presented as a preview of the final election, when, in fact, they are snapshots of a single moment.

In the face of a snap poll, talking heads are reined in. It doesn't do any good to claim that my candidate dominated the debate if we're going to hear a few minutes later that the polls reflect the opposite. During those 15 or so minutes, the spinmeisters are exposed as what they truly are - shills filling time.

Sadly, the shills don't even seem to realize how marginalized they are, and how out-of-step they are with America. Nothing I could dream up to illustrate my point could rival this reaction posted on the National Review's website last night, by somebody who is actually paid for her opinions:

"I Just Don't Get
any of the insta polls, which seem to give it to Obama."

Indeed you don't Kathryn, and indeed they do.