As the effort to enact new gun legislation hobbles along, liberals have noted over and over that in polls, 90 percent or so of the public favors universal background checks. In speaking about this yesterday, President Obama said, "Nothing is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change." Then Jonathan Bernstein explained that opinion doesn't get political results, what gets results is action. I'd take this one step farther: what gets results is not action per se, but action that produces fear. I'll explain in a moment, but here's part of Bernstein's argument:

The big story late last week, after the Democratic National Convention ended, was that President Obama had received a monster bump—Nate Silver put it at almost eight points—made all the more dramatic when compared to Republican challenger Mitt Romney's measley plus one.  But Obama isn't the only one leaving the party in Charlotte on an upward path: a new poll today shows Elizabeth Warren pulling even with Scott Brown, the Massachusetts Republican who she wants to replace in the Senate.

Back in 2009, Michele Bachmann told an interviewer that she was refusing to answer any questions on the census form other than how many people lived in her household. It seems this passionate advocate of the Constitution as sacred text found Article 1, Section 2 incompatible with her small-government ideology. But that's the problem with seeing things through such narrow blinkers: when you are convinced that every question in public debate has but a single answer ("Government is bad!"), then your answers to some ordinary questions can become absurd.

So it was when the House of Representatives, a body now seemingly devoted to seeking out new ways to make itself look stupid when it isn't pushing the country toward economic calamity, recently voted to eliminate funding for the American Community Survey, a supplement to the decennial census...

During the February 22 Republican primary debate in Arizona, moderator John King of CNN set up a question about global instability and the president’s ability to affect gas prices by noting that “the American people often don't pay much attention to what's going on in the world until they have to.” The next day, Politico media blogger Dylan Byers flagged the question, describing it “as a comment that warranted explanation” even though it was “not necessarily wrong.” Later that day, King sent Byers a statement defending his question, claiming that he “did not ‘suggest’ and

This is a guest post from Lawrence Jacobs, who is the Mondale Chair at the University of Minnesota and the author with Robert Shapiro of Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness, among other books.

One of the odd paradoxes of American politics is that political polling is soaring as responsiveness to popular opinion is in decline. Roger Simon’s missive flagged non-existent problems with surveys, as many have noted, and pulled a Bill Buckner on a serious problem that does exist: the impact of polls on American politics.

Simon reports that “polling drives our political process” and that it is “changing the prism through which the media — both mainstream and social — see events, which changes the national conversation. You can challenge the accuracy of polls. But you can’t challenge their influence.”

That’s a serious point but Simon flubs it.

The public spotlight is, naturally enough, on the polls that we see but there is an enormous polling operation behind the scenes that is funded by and for politicians, including officeholders and candidates. In the 1960s, the private polls that politicians commissioned were used to identify policies favored by most Americans but an increasingly sophisticated operation started to develop in the 1970s to drive public perceptions and emotions.

Although polls are (mistakenly) equated with tailoring policy to majority opinion, private surveys are primarily geared today to manipulating public opinion – not responding to it. Research that I have conducted with Robert Shapiro and James Druckman show that the particular words that prominent politicians use in high-profile and momentous settings are often researched and crafted in order to produce particular reactions.

Simon’s screed strikes a – glancing – blow at this pattern of polling polluting our political process and distorting serious policy debates. What Simon misses, however, are the net effects of dueling policy and election campaigns. Fashioning polls to drive messages and manipulate Americans and reporters is one thing.  Producing the desired outcome is an entirely different matter.

I suspect that we will find buried in the Bush presidential papers – as we did in Lyndon Johnson’s – elaborate plans to boost public support for invading Iraq in 2003. It “succeeded” for a short period and then public opposition returned and intensified, contributing to Bush’s dreary standing by the end of this as one of our most unpopular modern presidents.

Mitt Romney may well be crafting his positions and messages to the latest polls of Republicans primary voters and caucus goers. But a career of polling-crafting has produced a zig-zagging career over the past several decades that has cratered his reputation for conviction.

And, of course, private polls are not monopolized by any one candidate, party, or perspective. Unlike the 1960s and 1970s when Gallup and Harris monopolized polling and were successfully played by politicians, major politicians today have their own polls to devise counter-strategies and all of us have ready access to numerous private polls.

No one set of polls drives how Americans think nor how “the media” reports on politics. Neither does a single politician reap a unique advantage from polling. The signal is too diffuse.

The overall effects of polling are often neutralized in the cacophony of private and public surveys and the swirl of other media and campaign tactics. There are tremendous problems with American politics today; polls are not the cause.