[RyanMcGreal]

Here's a hypothesis for you: it's easier to follow the polls than it is to follow the issues, and when polling soundbites are ubiquitous, people will tend to follow the polls instead of following the issues.

You can spend an hour watching a presidential debate (plus additional hours looking up the various claims made), or you can spend a minute reading the heading, deck and first paragraph of an article that says this or that candidate "won" the debate.

Polls function as a kind of supernormal stimulus [1] that displace real analysis, in a manner analogous to the way that junk food, which distils fat, sugar and salt to their essence, displaces whole foods.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus