Out Of Whack: Polls Are In, Voting Is Not

By Peter Beinart

The polls," said House Majority Whip Tom Delay last month with characteristic delicacy, "are a joke." And in that spirit, the Republicans have thumbed their nose at the American people. Americans want Clinton to stay. They oppose impeachment hearings. They want the whole thing to end. And the Republicans don't care.

And they are right not to care. In our democracy, politicians are not supposed to listen to polls. But they are not supposed to rely solely on personal conscience either. The people should guide politicians' actions, and the framers of the Constitution established a mechanism for them to do so: voting. There is an election in six weeks. And the sliver of people who will actually vote in it are quite disposed to move toward impeachment. These are the people to whom the Republicans are rightly listening.

The problem isn't that politicians ignore the opinion polls. It is that the people who answer the opinion polls frequently don't vote. Yet the tremendous attention to polls seems to have convinced many Americans that their opinions should carry the day whether they turn out or not. During the 20 months from the beginning of 1973 until Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, 128 polls asked Americans whether they thought the President should leave office. But in the mere nine months since the Lewinsky scandal broke, according to Don Ferree of the Roper Center, pollsters have asked that question more than 325 times. A Gallup poll this month finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans want their Representatives to stick close to American public opinion when deciding on impeachment rather than do what they think is best.

But while polling has inflated people's belief in the power of their opinions, the mechanism for making those opinions felt--voting--has fallen into disrepair. The percentage of Americans who vote in midterm elections is particularly low. It has been dropping for decades, and some analysts predict that this November it will fall to a record-setting 35%.

Public opinion and voting opinion have been out of synch for years. But never before in this era of nonvoting has a midterm election turned into a referendum on a question as grave as impeachment. And so there is reason to believe that if Congress moves toward impeachment, many Americans will feel betrayed. An impeachment-bound Congress may find itself trapped in a paradox: by following the imperatives of our democratic process, it undermines its popular legitimacy.

--By Peter Beinart