Are public opinion polls a benefit or a curse to American politics?  What influence do they have on campaigns?  On governing?  What do critics point to as the key weaknesses of public opinion polls? Do you agree?  Explain?

Public opinion polls at their root are a very good thing. They allow a small percent of the population to ask important questions to a large percent of our population. Unfortunately, over time public opinion polls have become an annoyance to the general public, and at the same time transformed into a inaccurate method of finding other peoples opinions. The problem is that most people don't take the time to fill out these polls, often throwing them away and disregarding them. The people that do fill them out only make up a small percent of the U.S., causing a skewed and inaccurate representation of the nation as a whole. Furthermore, the people giving out these surveys and questionnaires actually believe the results they got were accurate and trying to fix policies, that in most peoples eyes, weren't broken. This creates a lot of laws and reforms that don't need to dealt with, wasting the governments time. The key problem with Public opinion polls is that they are supposed to be filled out by the "public" as a whole, and if only a few hundred thousand people are actually filling them out, they are not an accurate representation on the United States wants and needs.