When pollsters call, he advised, voters should lie. Only the first two parts were true. The Miami candidate who commissioned that poll is probably still wondering what went wrong. Polls serve us badly as a substitute for courage and leadership. Had polling existed in 1776, we would still be singing God Save the Queen.
Candidates also use polls to see how their advertisements are working.
If they could not rely on the polls, perhaps there would not be so many ads, and everyone and everything would be better off. Retail politics is about merchandising, not public policy. Of every 1,000 political ads, we are lucky if just one tells something that an intelligent voter would want to know. The rest are meaningless drivel intended to build up one candidate's name recognition and image or savage the reputation of another. To really clean up politics, we have to get rid of those ads.