George Soros is spending money to legalize pot in New Mexico? Someday, maybe, conservative wealthy people will get as serious about saving the country as Soros is about killing it. Here is Sandy Szwarc writing at American Thinker:
Efforts to convince New Mexicans to legalize recreational pot have been especially intense and well funded. After losing the legislature and the governorship, Democratic interests have set their sights on this year’s election candidates, hoping to turn the state reefer blue.
Local newspapers have been relentlessly reporting on polls claiming that most New Mexicans support the legalization of pot. The most recent story (the third this year) on yet another survey conducted by Albuquerque-based Research & Polling, Inc. (RPI) headlined that nearly 2:1 New Mexicans back legalized marijuana.
New Mexicans are being hoodwinked.
These news stories are not reporting news. They are marketing. As every communications and marketing professional knows, polling is the primary marketing technique to shape public opinion. Public relations and advertising firms use polls and surveys to create the “bandwagon effect” and take advantage of people’s natural tendencies to get behind ideas that are seen as popular. People instinctively feel more comfortable believing what they think everyone else thinks and being part of the “in” crowd.
In actuality, surveys and polls don’t measure opinions. They manipulate them. Professional marketing firms know how to use polling to define an issue and benefit the organization hiring them. It’s incredibly easy for a pollster to design polls to create any consensus the firm wants to promote, simply by how questions are phrased, the restricted choices, who is polled, how the questions are asked, and how the results are interpreted and reported (and what isn’t reported).
The RPI poll biases and weaknesses are numerous to anyone who looks. The poll randomly called New Mexico-issued cell phones and phones with N.M. prefixes. It stated that only 69% of the interviews were completed, for a total of 420 people surveyed (out of 1.24 million registered voters, per the latest New Mexico Voter Registration Statistics).
Read more: American Thinker
