To the Editor:
Re “What’s the Matter With Polling?,” by Cliff Zukin (Sunday Review, June 21):
Journalists should not try to pick winners and losers. That’s the job of voters.
Surveys can be useful for gauging what voters care about. But using them to predict elections has become a reckless addiction. Let’s get off them. Consumers of journalism can help. Every time you read, listen to or click on a predictive political story, you enable the angels of our lesser nature. So just say no to horse-race coverage and we will get better.
But there is a bigger lesson. Pollsters are having a harder time predicting elections because they can’t figure out who is likely to vote. No doubt there are methodological challenges. But the core problem is that shocking numbers of Americans don’t exercise their franchise.
Finding who will vote isn’t quite like finding a needle in a haystack. But when little more than one eligible citizen in three actually votes (as in the 2014 midterm election), we have more than a crisis in polling.
Low participation is worsening polarization, contributing to gridlock and undercutting the legitimacy of the system. Fixing polling is the least of our problems. Fixing our democracy by re-engaging its constituents is the real challenge.
MICHAEL ORESKES
Washington
The writer is editorial director and senior vice president for news at NPR and a former national political correspondent and Washington bureau chief of The New York Times.
