Should political polling be banned during an election year? Why or why not?
Even if it were doable though I don’t think that I would ban it. Sure, it tends to create a herd mentality among voters but just last Tuesday voters proved that it isn’t necessarily so. As far as polling has come since the days when the polls predicted that Alf Landon would beat FDR they are still an inexact science and it’s fun to watch the pollsters get the occasional egg on their face. Speaking as a former candidate for political office I can say that I would have loved to have some polls taken in my race. It was just a county race though in a rural county with a little over 28,000 registered voters so there were no polls and I had to wait what seemed like an eternity to find out the results. I’m sure that I aged twenty years in the two hours.
