Several inconvenient truths

There are two kinds of polls.  The first kind is designed to find out, as nearly as the sampling methodology can, what public opinion is.  The second kind is designed, consciously or unconsciously, to buttress certain people's fantasy land.

This is true, as we know, not only of polls, but of science and other sources of information.  We know that people, some more than others, are prone to want their information to confirm what they want to believe.

People who could not bring themselves to believe that a black man with a name like Barack Hussein Obama could really have come to be President of the United States constructed their birther fantasies.

People who found that the theory of evolution conflicted with their deeply held beliefs built edifices of pseudoscience.

People who didn't want to believe that the activities of mankind have heated up the atmosphere found ways to discredit climate scientists instead of trying to prove them wrong.

People who thought that mainstream scholarship had a liberal slant wrote Conservapedia, claiming to correct the slant, but actually creating more fantasy for themselves and others like them.

People who found it inconvenient to love their neighbor in the way that Jesus taught started the Conservative Bible Project, again in the name of correcting a liberal slant, but without any particular evidence of liberal meddling.  Their own meddling actually served only to dismantle the very foundation of Christianity.

And in the weeks before yesterday's presidential election, people who could not stand the idea of four more years with Barack Hussein Obama began to claim that the polls claiming that he would win had actually been falsified and given a liberal bias.

The truth is, of course, that the poll with the best scientific methodology is the most useful.  You can make predictions from an honest poll, and, lo, the predictions will come true.  Poll methodology influenced by wishful thinking may succeed in making the faithful happy in the short term, but when the election comes, the believers will just end up all the more disappointed that the results were exactly as predicted by the poll designed by people who just wanted to know what would happen.