A startling new polling technique developed by Dr. H. B. Harass has cast grave doubt on the reliability of current opinion polls. Dr. Harass, distinguished statistician and president of the National Institute of Band Wagon Mathematics, disclosed the existence of a vast segment of the American public undiscovered by previous polls.
After intensive research, Dr. Harass discovered that in every poll in recent years, those select individuals who made up the "cross section" invariably lied through their teeth. The reason: Respondents were forced to select an opinion from a prepared list of responses. The Harass method of eliciting spontaneous responses allows the public to express its true preference--from the heart.
Dr. Harass also concluded that the old categories used to break down a population sample--Democrat or Republican, Under 25 or Over 60--no longer reflect the true divisions of a tired, troubled America. He therefore devised a new set of categories for his data:
Conservative: meaning 1890s-style Reactionaries, or, to use a term in vogue, Consciousness I.
Liberal: 1930s-style Do-gooders (Con. II).
Freaky: 1960s-style Counterculture (Con. III).
Undecided: the rest.
There were worries at first that the Harass method would result in a wide scattering of responses, making it impossible to tabulate the data. But Dr. Harass was pleased to find that responses in all categories showed remarkable similarity and could be boiled down to no more than a few answers per category, with minor variations in wording. The professor explained, "This is what we in the profession might term an amazing coincidence."
But what staggered the Harass team was the breakdown of the responses in the Undecided category. Only 9% responded as Conservative, 12% as Liberal and 8% as Freaky--while 71% answered in the Undecided category. Not only was Undecided the largest grouping by far but it was not Undecided at all: A clear, coherent pattern emerged. What Dr. Harass discovered, in brief, is that 71% of the U. S. public considers itself neither Conservative nor Liberal nor Freaky but Catatonic. Careful analysis showed that this overlooked majority of Catatonics (who might also be referred to as Consciousness Zero) are, in the words of the good doctor, "verging on nervous breakdowns." He characterizes them as "too worn down, too frazzled, too numb to get excited about anything" and contends that this enormous voting bloc has existed in a state of glassy-eyed paralysis since the upheavals of the late Sixties.
Methodology was as follows: With the assistance of several hundred highly trained recruits from Dr. Harass' home institute, the team interviewed a cross section of the U. S. public. Since there were four categories, the sample was held to a total of four persons. All were citizens of voting age and residents of Amarillo, Texas. The results were then statistically weighted and multiplied by a factor of 51,000,000 to reflect the U. S. population as a whole (est. 204,000,000).
