Ruth Franklin
The Unreliable Voter
As I write this, Barack Obama has been ahead in the polls for several weeks. That phrase, ‘ahead in the polls’, is a familiar one, but it is so vague as to be meaningless. Because, of course, there is no such thing as a collective ‘the polls’, but dozens of different ones, each with its own methodology and its own purpose. There are nationwide polls conducted by media outlets, such as the New York Times and USA Today. There are independent polls conducted by mainstream polling companies, such as Zogby or Gallup, or by universities. And there are private polls – secret polls, if you will – done by polling firms that work for the candidates individually. As I look now at a popular polling website (which includes figures only from the first two groups, because private polls are never released), Obama’s lead ranges from as high as nine points to as low as four, but mainly holding at a comfortable six or seven.
I’ve had a chance to learn a little bit about polling over the past two years, because my husband is a consultant at a private polling firm that works for the Obama campaign. Every few days or so, they formulate new questionnaires to test the reactions of different demographic groups – say, Pennsylvania residents, ages thirty-five to thirty-nine, or Hispanics, ages sixty and older – to the latest bumps and dips in the campaign trail. My husband doesn’t divulge the specific questions, but after twenty-one months of steady polling, I’d be surprised if there were anything that hasn’t yet been tested, from Obama’s perceived elitism to Sarah Palin’s moose-hunting skills. After the calls are made (the questionnaires include a handy phonetic pronunciation of ‘Barack Obama’, as if anyone still hadn’t heard of him), the raw data arrive in charts totalling hundreds of pages. It’s then up to the strategists – my husband and his colleagues – to read the story behind the numbers.
As a critic who reads novels for a living – and as a mathematical illiterate who is flummoxed by anything beyond the basics – I am fascinated by the way this hidden narrative spirals forth from an accumulation of blank figures. But when I hear my husband groan in consternation because one night’s interviews contained an unrepresentative number of young black women, elderly white men, or disgruntled NASCAR fans, he seems more alchemist than social scientist, engaged in the admirable but (I fear) inevitably frustrating project of transforming a mountain of scraps into a coherent, meaningful whole.
The ‘Bradley Effect’ – the possibility that white voters are ashamed to confess to poll-takers that they won’t vote for a black candidate – has been brought up and smacked down repeatedly during this campaign. What worries me more is what might be called the ‘Unreliable Narrator Effect’. Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier is often cited as the classic example of the unreliable narrator, but the technique is one of the defining characteristics of modernist literature, from Henry James to Graham Greene. Narrators can be unreliable for many reasons – they are mentally unstable, they are victims of deceptions perpetrated by others, they are blinded by love or hatred. But most often they are unreliable simply because they do not know enough, or they are unable to understand what they do know. And by now it seems safe to assume that whenever a work of fiction is narrated in the first person, the voice we hear is unreliable: subjective, biased, with ulterior motives.
Polling is predicated upon the idea that the respondents will answer truthfully. But what if people simply are not capable of making accurate statements, not even about their own thoughts and beliefs? Has any of us not experienced how hard it can be to determine what one truly thinks about something, even – or especially – when the question is of life-changing importance? As the narrators of our own stories, we make decisions about what we tell others constantly and unconsciously, influenced by anything from what we ate for dinner to the anxiety provoked by an illness or a disappointment. And so beneath the tidy surfaces of questionnaires and numbers, the uncategorizable human mind roils. Of course, the pollsters know this too, which is why, two days before an election that ‘the polls’ say should be locked up, they are still biting their nails, sneaking cigarettes, and obsessing over life’s fundamental unpredictability.
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at the New Republic. She is working on a collection of essays about the literature of the Holocaust.