What the American population thinks is interesting trivia that can be spun into more effective PR, but not by itself terribly important. Ending polls won’t change any of this.
My God, this is a terrible string of wild-ass assumptions that you’re presenting as facts.
If a politician is penalized by stating a belief that is not mainstream, and has no way of knowing if a belief is mainstream or not, then they won’t state their beliefs AT ALL.
Or, the politician will state a belief, and then wildly deny that he ever said such a thing when he learns that the public disapproves of what he said.
Politicians do change positions, and hopefully this is done at times to match what their constituents want. For all you know, Hillary will continue to oppose TPP after the election.
I was asking for an example where a politician chose a side based on a poll, was elected because of it, then voted opposite their stated position. You seem to think this is a significant problem, so surely there must be examples.
Exactly. How is representative government supposed to work if our representatives don’t know what we want? Lying to politicians makes as little sense as lying to your waitress when she asks you what you’d like to order.
First, if I really think the MW should be raised, why should I say otherwise? If politicians did not listen to polls, they would be listening to lobbyists. Is that better in your book?
Second, politicians don’t spring out of the sea like Venus Aphrodite. When a party selects a candidate, why not someone who shares beliefs with the people.
Now in some cases the people are an ass, and a good politician will have to lead, since the obvious answer may be wrong.
Finally, if politicians only followed the polls they’d all be saying the same thing, which they don’t. So your premise is not even correct.
Assertion not in evidence. You can indeed tell if someone is lying by asking them variations on questions and seeing if they are consistent. Which is basically the same way that lawyers and police determine if someone is lying. Polling organizations have big databases of the information they get, and can do that kind of analysis. This would increase the cost of polling, and increase the error, but it would not make it useless. It’s pretty unlikely that individuals attempting to mislead pollers could do so consistently.
And… what would be the goal here? Imagine that a bunch of people decided to do this and totally fooled the pollsters. Then we’d just get more policies that we don’t support?
A much more effective plan would be to personally call and write letters to your politicians asking them to do things you don’t support, since they weight personal contact much more highly than poll results. “Effective” used here in the sense of “totally stupid and counter-productive.”