As IF Times

link More than half of U.S. Latinos favor same-sex marriage: survey | Reuters.

Seems that everything is done by polls these days, especially when it comes to election time.  Everyone wants to slice off a bit of demographic to imply significance from some bit of esoterica.  The standard technique is to isolate some segment of society and then make conclusions about their preferences as it pertains to the larger group.   This kind of segmentation has a lot to do with the messages being conveyed by the various political groups who would pander to whomever is likely to give the most votes.

An Internet search fails to find even an estimate of the number of polling firms operating in the U.S., but we are all familiar with the big name ones: Gallup, Rasmussen, etc.  There are also the newspaper  related polls such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Reuters to name a few.  Suffice to say though, if you want an opinion about something, someone will provide it for a fee.

The ubiquity of polling has created a political environment in which factions are pitted against each other in order to secure votes, which of course encourages polling to measure the temperature of any identified demographic, which brings us into a vicious cycle.  If you are catering to left handed people, the right handed people get disenfranchised and resentment between the two factions will escalate.   When people bemoan the polarization of the political process, this is ground zero of the cause.   Instead of saying anything substantive, politicians will employ strategies to rope in the desired demo as articulated by poll results.

The particular sample in the link above purports to show the proclivities of 26 million people via a sample of 1760.  The conclusion is that more than half of U.S. Latinos favor same-sex marriage.  I don’t know about you, but I think that this is not only a leap of logic, it’s a 3 day train ride of logic based on a sample of 1760 Latinos.  I would treat this conclusion with as much skepticism as if a sample of college men in San Francisco implied that 60% of college guys everywhere harbored homo-erotic fantasies involving Brad Pitt.   Angelina maybe.  To imply that all persons of an ethnic slice are likely to hold homogeneous opinions is naive at best, racist at worst.  I’m not convinced that all Chinese, all Germans or all Italians can be pegged by a sample of 1760 of them.

The real danger here is that in today’s attention deficit society, nobody reads the body of the polls.  They read the headline and ka-bing, it’s now a fact.  This is reminiscent of the early days of television advertising when marketers could say pretty much anything they wanted.  It was not uncommon to hear that “4 out of 5 doctors preferred Parliament cigarettes” or that “4 out of 5 Dentists choose Crest”.  Bottom line is, polling is as much marketing as science.  My poll of 5 people confirms this.

link Romney energizes campaign with feisty debate performance | Fox News.

By now, the media is all a-twitter about the big collapse.  No, not the Ryder Cup, that’s another story.  We’re referring of course to last evening’s first Presidential debate.  As we skim through the expected comments by pundits in the aftermath of the great debate, the most striking tone that emerges is the surprise at how well Mitt did versus the relatively flat performance of Barack.

This is amusing because Romney did not do anything different than he has been over this entire campaign and really, since he started public life.  It has been the reporting of it and the perception that has been exposed.   There were no surprise policy positions offered at the debate, nothing that hadn’t been pooh-poohed by the media for months.  For anyone who has been paying attention to the content and not the editorials of his positions, what he offered has been there for everyone to consider for at least the past year.

What changed was the stark juxtaposition of Romney’s pragmatic positions versus the ideological ramblings of Obama’s, laid bare for everyone to see, stripped of spin or embellishment.  It’s akin to the old chestnut about how the young man at 25 years of age, is amazed at how smart his once clueless father became over the past 10 years of their lives.

What I find truly amusing, actually alarming, are the comments by the so-called independents who admitted to being swayed by last night’s debate.  It truly illustrates the shallowness of most of the voting public.  It also shows the residual power and influence of the general media which, though subtle can greatly influence opinions by steadily offering a concocted version of events.

Despite inarguably having the greatest access to education and information in the history of mankind, the ability of people to think independently is overwhelmed by an American Idol culture in which groupthink is rampant.  Many people think that popularity equals legitimacy.  It is a particularly unique trait of humans to do things that are actually detrimental to their own survival, something that you would never observe in the animal world, with the obvious exception of lemmings.

Conservatives shouldn’t take too much joy in last night’s debates as far as swaying the hard core liberals.  We know that even if the liberal candidate were found to have bodies stuffed in a freezer in his house, he’d still get the liberal vote. In the 2010 elections, Californians had the choice of candidate A, a person with renowned business skills who ran a multi-billion dollar enterprise employing thousands and who spent their own money on their campaign; versus candidate B.  This candidate was a relic from the past who essentially had no plan but was a darling of the entertainment community.  Californians were faced with crippling debt loads, massive flight from the state because of taxes and regulation and in dire need of proven fiscal management expertise.  Sure enough, the B team won.