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The Insanity Of The National Poll

There are some purists out there who despise all political polls by default. I'm not one of those people. But I do have an aversion to polls that are basically meaningless, particularly when they dominate the news cycle. As the election fast approaches, every other day sees the release of a new poll -- from the LA Times, or Gallup, or NBC News -- offering the latest news on the national popularity contest between Bush and Kerry (with Nader usually thrown in as an alternate 3-way scenario.) When you hear chatter about one side being on the upswing, it's almost always because a new national poll has come out suggesting a few points of change in the race. (Though invariably within the margin of error, given how close the race is.)

But as we learned in the 2000 election, these polls are almost entirely irrelevant to the question of who will win in 2004. Bush could win the popular vote by 3% and still lose in an electoral college landslide, were he to surrrender Florida and Ohio. All that matters are the voters in the swing states -- and it's almost impossible to make any judgment about the shifting views of those voters from a national popularity contest. When I see the headlines again and again reporting national polls, I feel like I'm in some strange kind of wonderland, where the lessons of 2000 have been ignored. Sure, national polls show you general trends in the electorate that might be predictive of trends among voters that matter. But all sorts of polls could do the same. They might as well be running headlines saying: "New poll of unlikely voters shows Bush taking a small lead." Presumably people who don't vote still follow the candidates from a distance, and their changing opinions move roughly in synch with the voting population. But no one runs polls of non-voters because the Founding Fathers devised an ingenious scheme whereby people who choose not to vote don't have a say in who gets to be President. (Funny, huh?) The Framers also came up with another scheme whereby the national popular vote also has nothing to do with who gets to be President. Perhaps someone should alert the pollsters?

The Political Brain

Today's Sunday Times Magazine is running an essay of mine on the neuroscience of political affiliation -- as embryonic a line of research as you're likely to find, but an intriguing one. I first started mulling over the ideas this spring, when the Times covered an early study commissioned by two Democrat consultants that performed fMRI scans on people as they viewed campaign ads. The typical response to these studies at the time was that there's something creepy about political hacks using brain scans to make more effective ads. But to me -- having just written Mind Wide Open -- it seemed much more interesting, and much less creepy, if you looked at these results more as a political science experiment than an exercise in neuromarketing. Instead of scanning brains to devise more persuasive means of securing votes for Candidate X, scan brains to find an answer to that most mysterious of questions: how do political values form in the first place?

You can see how I ended up answering the question in the piece itself, but one thing is probably worth reiterating here: whatever conclusions we end up extracting for this line of research won't come exclusively from the neuroscientists. You'd need sociologists and political scientists and philosophers -- not to mention those political strategists -- to make sense of the results, to put them in context, and to propose new avenues of research. The neuroscientists would be mostly there to explain the results in terms of brain anatomy and function, leaving it to the social scientists to interpret the results on the level of human experience. In other words, the scans don't give you answers. They give you new kinds of questions.

What I Didn't Do On My Summer Vacation

I've just returned to Brooklyn, after almost three weeks with the family (and assorted friends) in the lovely seaside village of Westport, Mass. I'm tempted not to mention anything more about this spot, because it is strangely undiscovered compared to just about any other stretch along the Atlantic between New York and Boston, and given the vast readership of this blog, I could easily spoil the place with a single enthusiastic post. But let me just say this: the entire Coastal Villages stretch from Dartmouth to Little Compton, Rhode Island is as scenic and delightful as anything I've experienced in this area: endless lines of stone fences lining the gently sloping farmland descending down to the shore, with its dunes and tidal rivers and occasional rocky points jutting out into Rhode Island Sound. There are fancy bits, to be sure, particularly in Westport Harbor and Little Compton, but nothing compared to the extravagance and absurd prices of the Hamptons or much of Cape Cod and the Islands. There are working farms throughout the area, sometimes within eyesight of the ocean. Anywhere between NYC and Boston, you know you're in a place that's either wonderfully undiscovered or wonderfully conserved when you've got land still cheap enough that it makes economic sense for the cattle to have ocean views.

This trip also marked a milestone for me: the longest stretch of time that I have experienced with a sub-28.8 dialup connection for nearly a decade. So I have an excuse for the nonexistent posting. Plus, I was looking at this all day from the deck of the house we were renting:

At any rate, I'm home now and looking forward to the back-to-school energy that always kicks in for me in early September, even though I haven't actually been in school for about twelve years . Lots of exciting things to report here in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, be sure to check out this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. More later when it's linkable.