GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – How can political polls get it so wrong?
If you googled the polls of the USA election prior to their election day you would have thought Biden would take the presidency with a comfortable margin. Instead it’s a cliffhanger.
We also saw this in 2016 when Clinton was expected to win and in the UK when David Cameron lost the Brexit referendum he was expected to win and Britain voted to leave the EU.
There’s a number of possible reasons to explain this phenomenon but let me list just four of them.
First of all BIden is winning the popular vote so that extent the polls are off but not by much . It’s the USA’s very odd Electoral College system that makes pollster predictions difficult.
Second – there is increasing polling fatigue. A lot of people now either refuse to be polled or simply do not answer their phone during the run-up to an election.
The third reason I would offer is the powerful influence of social medium which I suspect is so complex that no one really understand it – but in times of doubt and trouble herd instinct sometimes kicks in.
“I don’t know what to think – I wonder what everyone else thinks?”
At which point the social bubble you belong to ( and who is influencing the information within that social bubble ) becomes important.(This is where outside forces trying to manipulate the outcome can become an issue)
Which brings me to the last reason I’ll offer today is one I was first alerted to many years ago when I studied Social Reasearch – namely that people can say one thing and do another.
A person , for example, might tell a pollster they will vote for candidate X and then simply not turn up to vote on election day.
So , for me, poll watching is interesting , but people watching is fascinating.
Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.
By their preparedness for Trump’s contesting of the result it is quite obvious that the Democrats had a much better idea of what the vote was going to be than the publicised polling indicated.
The reason the poles got it so wrong is that they are manipulated to create public sentiment, not to measure it.
D J S
“The reason the poles got it so wrong is that they are manipulated to create public sentiment, not to measure it”.
Have to agree David. Manufacture of consent/ discontent/compliance/ defiance is the domain of contemporary MSM, and i dare say alternative media. And as Bryan notes, social science surveys, especially those that rely on simplistic quantifiable data, are notoriously unreliable (hence invalid), unless taking a very large sample. Political polling adds to the narrative but adds little to real understanding. I suspect a good many pollers know this but, hey, everyone’s got to make a living.
What is interesting is that even though polls were manulpated to create public sentiment in support of Biden/ Democrats (I presume that is what you are implying), millions still supported Trump. It’s close. No wonder he’s pissed off. But hard luck Donald!
100%, and fully agree with DS.
I don’t think it was herd mentality, these people knew who they were going to vote for, but if the Dems, the media, the talking heads and the corporate woke – basically the establishment- are all going to call you a racist idiot, you sure as hell aren’t going to tell the pollsters where your vote is going. Why would you?
A gentler version of this was true of Winston voters – until he ran out of people to lie to!
Considering the unrelenting uninterrupted condemnation of the man by all the commentators and all the MSM the fact that he turned out to have almost half the country support him is truly remarkable.
D J S
David Stone: “….the unrelenting uninterrupted condemnation of the man by all the commentators and all the MSM…”
Agreed. It was relentless, and from the very beginning. Anyone who’s read the book “Fear” will have seen that.
“…the fact that he turned out to have almost half the country support him is truly remarkable.”
Yup. It’s remarkable, given that constant stream of anti-Trump invective to which you have referred above. And to which we here were exposed, of course.
However. It’s obvious that many voters paid attention to what Trump did, rather than what he said, or was said about him. Very wise of them. The result has, by the looks of it, hogtied the Dems’ ability to carry out their proposed programme.
David Stone: I’d add that Trump is the first US president in around 40 years not to have started another war.
This has been commented on in the US as well.
Unfortunately, it’s likely that we’ll now be back to Dem business as usual on that score.
You are onto it David.
Given the near constant stream of global (?!) media abuse directed his way is unprecedented, I’m curious as to when we will finally understand how and why global media has been weaponsied against this guy which in many instances could be characterised as treasonous.