The past few months I’ve been getting four or five text messages daily from political candidates requesting money. Though they often claim to want opinions about one thing or another, it’s clear these polling requests come from people who don’t care in the least about my views. They care about money. They are not doing polling. They are soliciting votes, money, or both under the guise of conducting a poll. I consider all such enquiries to be akin to push polling.
Push polling started as phone call campaigns masked as research. They were, in fact, clever and dishonest ways of politicking. For example, the caller may report she is a concerned citizen who wants you to know that So & So who is running for congress is a communist, a drunk, and a drag queen. Would you vote for such a person? Well, yikes, since you put the question to me in those terms, gee, I doubt I’d vote for So & So. The caller doesn’t want an opinion, does she, for the message, certainly false, is a blatant manipulation. Such polls were and are unethical, and, of course, not polls at all, are they? No, they amount to bald-faced deceit. Just yesterday I received a message asking if I thought America should adopt socialism as our form of government. I don’t know who sent the message, and I don’t care. I do know the question is disingenuous, so I erased it. Data gatherers are everywhere when elections draw near, and they are shameless when it comes to their mission, which is often not transparent. The political topography is littered with landmines.
Next will come loads of deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence. You might get a phone call from Elvis or Musk or John Wayne asking for your support for whatever cause. “Hello, friends, this is Oprah asking you to vote for my lifelong neighbor, Donald Trump, the most honest man I’ve ever met.” Of course, though the voice matches Oprah’s, the call is bogus. Use of AI can have a critical influence on an election if, for instance, a leading candidate voice, say an AI voice sounding like Jimmy Carter, calls millions of voters telling them all to suck rotten fruit and go to hell. To date, such a ploy would be grossly unethical and recently deemed illegal.
Another example of dishonest polling may go something like this:
“Are you planning to vote for Biden or Trump in the next election?”
“I’m leaning toward Biden.”
“Would it make a difference in your decision if you knew that Joe Biden has dozens of lesbians working in his White House staff and has a serious issue of falling asleep during daily briefings?
“Well, I….”
“Thank you for your time. Goodbye.”
George W. Bush used a similar dirty trick in 1994 in his bid for the governorship of Texas against Ann Richards, claiming she had an office dominated by lesbians. Apparently Texans have a long-standing prejudice aimed at gay people. Go figure.
I somehow ended up on Trump’s chump list because, in my capacity as an English teacher, I sent a text message to correct a word choice of a Republican congressman who used “hung” (people are hanged and pictures are hung) when he should have used “hanged.” Now I get junk mail from both the GOP thinking I am a loyal MAGA follower as well as the Dems because I have sent small donations to a couple of congressional candidates. Consequently, I get streams of requests and lots of pleading from candidates in all parts of the country, up and down the tickets. Woe is me to have peeked inside Pandora’s box. It’s not pretty.
Sure some polls are genuine and useful, but it is hard to tell what an ethical pitch for voters’ views is and what is an effort to influence unethically. Donald Trump wants to know if I’ll be his VP. Biden wants to know if I want to meet for lunch with Obama, Clinton, and Biden himself because they all want to meet me. But first Trump and Biden want me to contribute to their campaigns to qualify for their insincere offers. They all hope I will make donations on a revolving monthly basis so the money may be efficiently drawn from our accounts as a steady revenue stream. Understood. But I don’t want to be Trump’s VP. I don’t even want to be in the same room or county with that felon and sex abuser. And though I wouldn’t mind having lunch with Biden and the boys, I would rather spend my time in Washington DC browsing through the Smithsonian. For the moment, I don’t want to contribute to anyone who tells me it is critical I send money now because the deadline to save the world is tonight at midnight and my money will be matched up to 600%. One hapless politician, always addressing me as “friend,” sends three or four requests for money each day—never fails. E-Gad!
Our system of electing leaders is cumbersome and fraught with unsustainable beggary. Most of us in the Northwest dread it when the president or vice president show up at Boeing Field. We know that traffic will be tied up for hours and police will be in full force on overpasses and along highways leading to homes of billionaires in Medina or Mercer Island. They, our leaders, are here to pass the hat to well-moneyed folks so they, our leaders, can continue to maintain power and beg for money for four more years. The reason many of us are annoyed is because the visit to our part of the world has nothing to do with government business. No, Medina and Mercer Island are ATMs where the big money people live, where the fundraisers take place while we, the hoi pollo, sit in traffic grinding our teeth.
Which brings us back to push polls and general dishonesty embedded into the fabric of the way we do elections. A fair conclusion is we are doing democracy all wrong. As things stand, our officials must spend a large portion of energy raising money, slinging mud at their opponents, and gaming the system.
This is no way to run a railroad.
Or a country!