For several months now, here in the UK and Europe as well as the USA mainstream media have been obsessing over polls, predictions and pronouncements about the outcome of the American the presidential election. Many of these polling based predictions presented their conclusions with a level of confidence which belied the data, disregarded the limitations of opinion polling and made mockery the democratic process. And most predicted a win for Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris
Yesterday we on the saner side of the pond woke to hear that the US electorate had chosen Donald Trump to be their president again. So we have a right, have we not, to ask WTF was all that bollocks about polls indicating the Democrats were about to scre a landslide victory that would humiliate Donald Trump and destry the Republican Party about?
Throughout this election campaign I have avoided commnting on the election because things have become so crazy in American politics that to merely point out that the polling companies were skewing data in order to give the impression Kamala Harris was ahead and thus nudge voters towards her was sure to attract venomous attacks from lefties, with accusations that the author murdered grsnnies, ate babies for lunch and habitually molested small furry animals.
There was no point trying to explain that one was not a Trump supporter but simply had conccerns about the way polling companies were skewing their findings.
Here are a few points on polling techniques and the manipulatio9as the case may be,n of data. . First of all it should be clear to anybody with more brain cells than they have tits or testicles that (as the case may be,) that polls are not able to 'predict' the outcome of elections with any degree of certainty.
That has been obvious for some time and manifests itself in different polls having different results at similar times. Turning to the question as to whether the polls are manipulated or used to manipulate, the latter is more likely than the former...BUT... Here we have to differentiate between who makes the poll, who pays for the poll and who publishes the poll.
Many polls are produced by research companies adding or including the questions in surveys they are already doing (e.g. omnibus surveys where clients buy a few questions rather than a whole survey). The cost of doing them is low and they may publish them for free. Some have agreements with newspapers, but when I last discussed this with a very senior newspaper person the view was 'they're not worth paying for, so we don't pay them any more.'
Clearly who publishes what and how they report/spin it does mean they can be used to influence. Polling companies have always been open about the fact that they adjust or 'weight' results. Some of these weightings are 'everyday' (e.g. weighting it by age and region to match the population) others seemed to be more 'judgemental' (e.g. adjusting for likelihood to vote or the 'shy Trumper' phenomenom).
On the other had pollsters are in denial about the fact that they present their data with a level of certainty that wasn't justified. Challenge organisation that have published polls which were 'wrong,' and they will cite a litany of excuses, usually concluding that their results were in fact correct but hve been misuderstood.
Opinion pollsters, of neccessity, have to rely on a number of assumptions, all of which are precarious and easily to be incorrect and the general problems are multiplied tenfold for political polling. The organisers have to assume that they have asked a cross section of people who accurately represent the entire constituency. Which of course presupposes that the pollsters also have a very deep and accurate knowledge of all the demographics of that constituency.
They have to get answers from all of that representative sample otherwise it will no longer be a properly representative sample. They have to assume that every one of those people is telling the truth about who they support. They have to assume that none of those people will change their mind before polling day and they have to assume that all of them will in fact vote.
If the race is a particularly tight one all of these factors have to be pinpoint accurate. Just one percentage point wrong can skew the entire sample. Then there may be rogue factors in particular cases, such as the data not giving an answer the customer wants and the pollster surreptitiously changing the results. And are all the individuals carrying out the polling 100% trustworthy? I doubt that they are particularly well paid and may well take short cuts to get the job done. Individual political bias is also a constant possibility.
Under all these circumstances, the most surprising thing is that any poll manages even to get close to reality.
A prime example of how polls are used tio manipulate opinion rather than simply reflect it occurred in the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. Shortly after the result was published, in an article about the “Yes” campaign, nationalist leaders openly admitted that the strategy was to “create a sense of inevitability” in order to suppress the “No” vote in Glasgow, because it could disproportionately affect the overall result. Although they didn't say so in the published piece, it's clear now that the polls produced by “Yes” and its friendly media outlets over the summer of 2014 showing them with a narrow lead formed part of that effort.
Now look at that poll in the strongly Republican state of Iowa just four days before the vote that put Harris three points ahead in the midwest state. Normally a poll in an individual US state would not attract much attention outside that state, but this particular poll ecame the top news story not just in the USA but also in Europe and around the world. Though it had been clear since the early of October that the Harris campaign was in trouble and the momentum was with Trump, pundits responded to that Iowa poll by commenting that it indicated a late suge of support for the Democrat and surely meant Trump's bid to regain The White House was doomed.
In the event Trump won Iowa by 13 points. So WTF was that that polling nonsense about?
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