Majorities can be dead wrong. It's the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes polls vary markedly over a few days' time, showing nothing more than how confused we are. The confusion is left dangling in the air as an oddity to be wondered at, its complexity never explored. We shrug our shoulders and surf to the next channel.
Polls are anonymous reflections of our passive opinions rendered without consequence.
Yet they appear to have profound influence on political activities in Congress and other places. We watch or read a poll and think we have participated in democracy. But polls are artificial statistical studies that are not the same thing as votes, not the same as letters, not the same as active engagement. These visceral appeals are power-grabbing tactics pure and simple. An example of this was the Willie Horton story which was discovered in Lee Atwater's GOP focus groups in 1988 and rendered into the form of a campaign commercial by the muckraker Floyd Brown.