It's becoming almost a daily fixture on the Rec List: a diary reporting on some new poll that says Bernie Sanders is gaining on Hillary Clinton by this much, or she's walloping him by that much, or they're doing this much better or worse than these Republicans.
It's toxic. It's an addiction. And we need to go off it cold turkey.
First, these diaries serve the same function as the relentless reporting of polls in the media does: to make news out of nothing. Nothing has happened. This news affects none of us directly, unless we're employed by one of those campaigns.
Second, they keep us fixated on the horse race rather than the issues. Whether Sanders leads Clinton in Iowa 52 to 38 or Clinton leads Sanders in South Carolina 68 to 25 has not a single damn thing to do with whether any of us should vote for either one of them -- unless we really do want more than anything else to side with the winner, in which case we're pitiful excuses for human beings, and we deserve to have our democracy taken away from us.
Third, these polls give us no information about how informed the respondents are, and so we have no idea whether the poll results are based on anything of substance. They could have been influenced by a locally circulating viral video or a flurry of tweets. They could have been influenced by a real, breaking news story. We don't know. We don't know whether new or different data would change these respondents' answers. We do know that Americans, by and large, are clueless, and even the ones who aren't clueless are often misled, and even the ones who aren't misled are often selective in their acceptance of new information. All the poll stories tell us is that this sample of these voters have this gut reaction to the candidates right now. Which may or may not be useful at all, since the elections are . . . when?
Oh, yeah -- they're all in 2016. So, fourth, these polls are too far ahead of the relevant elections to be meaningful to us. They may be useful to the campaigns as something to base their strategies on, but for us? Useless and distracting.
But the fifth and most important thing is that not only are these diaries pointless, they're harmful. Because as well as serving the same function as the relentless reporting of polls in the media, they have the same effect: to breed complacency in the winners and despondency in the losers. Actually, here on DKos, the effect is even worse, because it intensifies our existing internecine division. Every, and I mean every, poll diary is followed by the same predictable round of sniping between a certain group of Clinton supporters and a certain group of Sanders supporters. You can list them all by name now, and so can I. They're easy to identify, because they dependably rec up each other's most obnoxious comments. Every new poll makes them more insufferable. Does any of us need to be reminded any further that Clinton is a bank-owned patrician or that Sanders is an independent socialist and not a "real" Democrat? Do we need to be told once again that African-Americans distrust Sanders or that they actually think he's a breath of fresh air? Does any Clinton or Sanders supporter wake up in the morning thinking that the day won't be complete until he or she is called a corporate dupe or a unicorn chaser? Enough, for chrissakes.
Yeah, these users are individual people making individual (bad) choices. Nobody's forcing them to act like 12-year-olds. But the poll diaries seem to make these choices irresistible.
Polls aren't news. They're a low-cost, low-effort news substitute. That's why the mainstream news media eat them up. They're also a great source of quasi-information that stimulates our confirmation bias. That's why we eat them up. Well, they're not good for us, and we need to stop consuming them.
Instead of listening to crosstables, we should be listening to people. Instead of browbeating each other, we should be getting off this site and educating the folks who don't have a reliable source of information about the candidates and their platforms. We should be asking them what they're basing their decisions on, then sharing what we know and they don't. Don't like Sanders? Tell people what makes Clinton better. Don't like Clinton? Tell people what makes Sanders better. Don't like Clinton or Sanders? Tell people what makes O'Malley or Lessig or Vermin Supreme better. Listen to what they have to say in reply. Then come back here and write a diary about that.
None of us can read minds or tell fortunes. None of us knows what the future holds. Polls are a way of pretending to have knowledge that we really don't have. As an allegedly reality-based community, we need to recognize that these polls aren't reality at all -- they are, at best, a model of reality, and at worst an unsubtle attempt to remold it nearer to our hearts' desire. We need to kick the poll habit.
And if folks won't stop writing these poll diaries, we can at least stop recommending them.