Polls for Prom Queens

The Wall Street Journal brings up a good point: we’re getting addicted to polls.

We watch them constantly, analyze them for mistakes and biases, and then spread the gossip. If someone isn’t convinced this election is more of a high school prom queen competition than any other election cycle, then just look to our obsession with polling. Every little thing that a candidate does, or some even that happens on the national level, can be explained through poll results. “Obama is up in Florida? Well, that’s because Palin spent so much RNC money on her clothes.” And we pick apart the sources of our gossip, too. “I look at the Drudge Report every single morning and spend three hours talking about how much Drudge sucks.” This makes as much sense to me as making following around the girl who starts rumors in your fifth period geometry class.

We forward emails, we send links, we print polls out, we highlight them, we talk about them, we argue about them, and we even exaggerate them. We can’t stop checking them, and can’t stop using them to prove other people wrong. We get excited when our candidate does well, and frustrated when he can’t seem to capture a state. We make up reasons why certain demographics are voting one way, or explain it away as the poll’s bias. We love polls. And that love consumes us.

But would we be America without some sort of celebrity obsession? This election has given us the resources and opportunities to become addicted to polls, through websites like Pollster.com, RealClearPolitics.com, and FiveThirtyEight.com. We can gauge how popular the candidates are and worthy of that sparkling tiara.