Isn't the article's main concern the conflict of interest when polling companies release both public and private polls?
They have an incentive to release inaccurate results to the public in order to benefit their private clients even further.
They have an incentive to release inaccurate results to the public in order to benefit their private clients even further.
Push polls aren’t even polls. They’re just advertising.
However, the utility of a "push" poll goes up closer to the vote, because voters will have less opportunity to review and correct misimpressions that the poll gave them. Hence the time between polls goes to zero as time to the vote approaches zero, and why some governments feel that they have to step in to create a prohibited window before a vote.
Also, a traditional definition of a "push" poll is one that is meant to change the minds of the people taking the poll, but more effective in many circumstances, and definitely more common (because it is cheaper) is a poll which uses strange phrasing to get results that can be reported (after being carefully framed in a press release) in a way that implies far greater support or opposition for something that would be indicated by a more direct questioning. The fact that every vote is to some extent a Keynesian beauty contest, even if that's simply because people are convinced by ad populum and question themselves if they see that the crowd disagrees with them, means that even an "objective" poll would push.
Tracking polls aren’t for informing some secret cabal, or even to inform. It’s the horse race. It sells papers. But there’s nothing biased about “Is the country on the right track, or the wrong track?”
The classic example is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
Every few years, polls get verified against reality at the ballot box. If you're running a polling company, would you want to sell your market research as the company whose polls were some way off the votes they'd just seen counted because you were trying to influence the electorate?