The cell phone rang at 9:21 p.m. on a weekday.
I almost didn’t answer. Unfamiliar number. Late in the evening. Probably an automated voice expressing urgency about the viability of my automobile insurance—never mind that I don’t own a car.
But then: Why not? You never know.
So I answered.
And I heard the magic word: “Siena.”
The Siena Poll was calling me.
Or rather: The Siena Poll was calling me—the actual Siena College Research Institute Poll.
Or maybe not. The connection was tenuous–echoing on my end, garbling on her end. Unprofessional, but understandable: She was a poll-taker in a pandemic. She wasn’t working from a call-center cubicle. She was, perhaps, curled up on a couch, or slouching in bed, awaiting instructions from algorithms.
I’m not saying I stayed on the call because I wanted to ease her lot. No: I wanted to be heard. I had the chance to contribute to one of the major political polls that actually make headlines and determine public discussion.
Would she ask about my approval rating of Trump?
Would she ask about my opinion on the direction the country is heading?
Would she ask about—
Yes. Yes. And yes, yes, yes.
She asked about everything I would have wanted a poll taker to ask me about. (And more: I didn’t know enough about my home-state Governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes to express approval or disapproval, so I said, “I don’t know,” and she said, “Okay,” and I thought: Yes! A confession of ignorance is, in itself, valuable information! Science in action!)
In the days to come, I checked the Siena Poll’s website to see if I could detect a pattern as to the timing of the public release of their polls, and I calculated that the latest results might be due on the upcoming Monday, but the upcoming Monday was Memorial Day, which I figured was an inopportune moment for a polling institution to try to insert itself into a news cycle. I still checked the Siena site on Memorial Day (because you never know), and then I checked it on Tuesday (nothing: so maybe I’d misheard “Siena” and I’d wasted hours of my life—or, actually, 14 minutes, according to my iPhone), and then Wednesday—
Now, let me be clear. I don’t overestimate my contribution to the national discourse. I know that I have been, as the Siena press release says, “weighted to reflect known population patterns” and “merged and statistically adjusted by age, party by region, race/ethnicity, and gender to ensure representativeness.”
But I also know that around 9:34 on a Thursday evening—thirteen minutes into a fourteen-minute phone call, weeks deep into a global pandemic, and, in the scheme of things, mere moments away from the national insanity following the murder of George Floyd—I heard a pollster’s cat mewing in the background, and I’m sorry to say that I know as much about the direction in which this country is heading as that cat.