What are Opinion Polls good for?

In the US, we are fed nearly daily "results" that interpret the findings of "opinion polls".  The apparent purpose of these polls is to influence public opinion, not to measure it.  When people who value finding themselves "on the winning side", or who otherwise display herd mentality, are fed propaganda suggesting that they are in the minority, some people are presumed to be sufficiently lacking in principle that their opinions will be swayed, not by argument, but by the numbers shown to them as though they were a concrete measure of reality.

Opinion polls, particularly those inquiring about issues such as liberty versus serfdom, are inherently biased from the get go by the extremely low response rate of those who love liberty to such polls.  For example, I refuse to participate in a poll designed to function as a surrogate for the actual ballot, because I believe this to be a perversion of the concept of democracy in voting and because my opinion is, simply, my business and becomes public only as I cast my actual vote.

Additionally, most such polls are conducted, and then interpreted, by agencies that have demonstrated very clearly that they are themselves biased ... such as "news" media and American academe.  When the sample is selected by someone with a dog in the race, the poll is conducted by such, and the results are then interpreted by more people with dogs in the race, it seems obvious to me that these polls are mostly propaganda tools and not legitimate measuring devices.

The only measuring device that matters is at the real polls, and that is bad enough ... the leftists have historically manipulated elections through buying of votes (see walking-around money not to mention the welfare state), putting their own impediments in the way of voting without extortion (see "Antifa"), and demanding a recount whenever they closely lose an election (the re-counts often being done by leftist bureaucrats.)  In 2020, how many million illegal aliens will be encouraged to cast votes?  We know that the democrat party was encouraging voter registration in California on the second Clinton election, just as we also know that communist China was making democrat contributions.

Remember, when a leftist in the US accuses someone of scurrilous, corrupt, fraudulent practices, this is generally Projection in action.  That is to say, the leftists are master practitioners of most of the things they accuse liberty-loving people of.