Charlotte officials tout $275m Hornets subsidy with worst shitty poll in the history of shitty polling

Polling is garbage science. If you ever doubt it, please immediately read this 2015 Jill Lepore article in the New Yorker, in which she lays out how 1) the idea of scientific phone polling is laughable when hardly anyone is willing to talk to pollsters on the phone anymore; 2) it’s even more laughable since pollsters aren’t allowed to autodial cellphone numbers, and nobody has landlines anymore; 3) “Using methods designed for knocking on doors to measure public opinion on the Internet is like trying to shoe a horse with your operating system”; 4) even for the tiny sliver of non-randomly self-selected folks who choose to answer polls, they tend to get people to declare opinions on things that they either don’t know about or don’t have a decided position on; 5) the entire enterprise serves mostly to reify “public opinion” into a measurable metric when how people feel about things is way more complicated and elusive than pressing 1 or 2.

That said, there are better polls and worse polls, and then there are polls that are straight-up propaganda. Which brings us, at last, to the city of Charlotte’s recent poll on LinkedIn (see above re: shoeing horses) that goes like this:

That’s pretty straightforward, right? Just asking about whether the city should extend its lease with the Hornets or not, either you’r for it or agin’ it or you have no opinion. (“I have many questions” is not an allowable answer, but it never is.) Except, as the Charlotte Business Journal points out, if you click that little “see more,” the story changes:

Yep, the city of Charlotte polled residents — or actually just LinkedIn users, since I just responded to the poll, and I’ve never even been to Charlotte — about whether it should extend the Hornets’ lease without mentioning that it would mean spending $275 million on arena upgrades as part of the deal. And even the fine print is misleading: The “contractual obligation,” established with one of those dread state-of-the-art lease clauses that were all the rage when Charlotte spent $260 million to build a new arena for the Hornets in 2005, just applies to the first $173 million, while the other $102 million is just an enticement to get team owner Michael Jordan to extend that team-friendly lease for 15 years; and even the initial $173 million is only “obligated” in the sense that if the city doesn’t spent the money, Jordan can break his lease now instead of waiting till it ends in 2030 to threaten to move someplace, which could be tough given that the NBA seems set on granting expansion teams to Seattle and Las Vegas, leaving, I dunno, Greensboro?

None of this stopped city marketing and communications director Jason Schneider from presenting the poll results to the Charlotte city council’s economic development committee this week as some sort of evidence for the lease extension being popular with somebody. “Obviously, the lede was buried, as you say in your industry,” committee chair Malcolm Graham told the CBJ; Schneider replied that “the LinkedIn poll isn’t meant to be scientific — I included the screen grab to show council/people as [an] example of the social-media engagement efforts,” which seems to be marketingese for “sure, the numbers are meaningless, but I just wanted to show the council our ability to generate meaningless numbers using the internet.”

The full council is set to vote on the Hornets subsidy in three weeks, and still the council website doesn’t provide any details of what the actual language of a lease extension would look like, just this shitty marketing slideshow. There are many, many ways that democracy is broken in this country, but “city officials only present legislators with cherry-picked data before a vote and then say it’s okay because it’s ‘not meant to be scientific'” has got to be near the top of the list.