Polls do not offer perfect results, but maybe they aren't supposed to. Polls are very good at describing a single moment in time. When asking someone two months ahead of an election who they plan to vote for, their answer reflects their preferences at that time. Yet, America has come to understand these answers as a concrete understanding of what will happen two months later. In the current news cycle, new information is revealed every second. Preferences are changing with every new article published.
In my poll to my peers, I attempted to ask students what policy preferences affected their vote. However, students only ability to answer the question would be to ask themselves if they were to vote at the current moment what policy area would most affect them at that moment. Surely, there was no way to decipher how their preferences at the moment of taking my poll had shifted from their preferences at their time of voting in the election, whether that shift happened consciously or subconsciously.
In my poll I asked respondents which policy area most affected their vote in the 2020 Presidential election. Although, by asking about which policy affected their vote, I also inherently assumed that voters were persuaded by policy rather than personality. Even when my respondents would answer the question with what they believed was the policy matter they most care about, there was no ability for them to take into account how/if the candidate, or the political party, played even greater influence on their vote than any one policy area.
​
Legitimate pollsters don't have the same luxury that I did to simply text their polls in a group chat of their friends and hope that it ultimately gets sent to a diverse group. Just as I sought to reach a diverse base within the student body, real world pollster seek to get responses from a diverse base of citizens. They must strategically seek out to question a group of people who statistically cover a wide away of preferences. But what truly is a diverse population of 320 million people?
​
