Question

Do you think polls have a positive, negative or neutral effect on the democratic process? Explain your answer using evidence (find a poll).

Answer 1

The correct answer to this open question is the following.

If you ask us to find any poll, we are going to choose the polls that made the news on CNN one week before the past US elections of November 2020.

I think polls have a neutral effect on the democratic process in United States politics.

It is clear that initially, polls were used to know the opinion of voters before an election. Even before, when the political party is trying to select a candidate, the poll can tell campaign managers about the favorable or not opinion voters have about one specific candidate.

Next, polls have used recently as a competitive advantage for candidates in that the campaign teams make the poll information public through news media and they say that its candidate is at the top of the public preferences. The real message they are trying to say is that as its candidate is at the top, you should consider voting for the right gut that is at the top of the preferences.

However, in the two last elections, polls have been far from reality. In the 2016 US election, most polls favored Hillary Clinton by far, and she lost the election. In the recent election, most polls -including the ones at CNN- predicted an easy victory for Bidden, and that did not happen.