Posted on 05/10/2015 11:00:45 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The website of Nate Silver, the American polling expert, surveyed all of Britain’s public-opinion surveys on Election day in Britain and declared that the chance that David Cameron’s Conservatives would win a majority of seats “was vanishingly small when the polls closed — around 1 in 500.”
But that is precisely what happened, leading Nate Silver to write a piece titled “The World May Have a Polling Problem.” He listed the errors that overtook “probably the four highest-profile elections of the past year, at least from the standpoint of the U.S. and U.K. media”:
1) The final polls in the Scottish-independence referendum showed the “no” side winning by just 2 to 3 percentage points. It won by nearly 11 percentage points.
2) Polls “significantly underestimated the GOP’s performance” in the 2014 midterm elections last November. In the Senate, GOP margins were about 4 points better than the polls in the average Senate race. The 2014 election was, on average, tied with 2002 as the second-worst polling year for Senate races in a quarter century (the worst was 1998).
3) In Israel, polls badly underestimated the performance of the right-wing Likud Party, projecting it would win about 22 seats in the Knesset; in fact, it won 30.
Silver came up with various explanations for the errors, noting first of all that voters are becoming harder to contact, so pollsters rely less on direct contact and more on online questionnaires. Some of those online polls abandon probability sampling, the bedrock of polling methodology. In addition, he also observed that “some pollsters have been caught withholding results when they differ from other surveys, ‘herding’ toward a false consensus about a race instead of behaving independently.”
Two examples of “herding” in the 2014 election appeared in the Kansas and Virginia Senate races. Pollsters there didn’t release their numbers because they deviated too much from what others showed. In that way, Virginia voters were badly served because no late published poll caught Republican Ed Gillespie’s last-minute surge that almost defeated Democratic incumbent Mark Warner.
In Britain’s election last week, we see another troubling instance of “herding.” The polling firm Survation admitted that its final poll showed the Conservatives with a lead of 37 percent to 31 percent over the Labor Party — almost the exact final result. The company’s CEO explained why he failed to publish the poll: “The results seemed so ‘out of line’ with all the polling conducted by ourselves and our peers — what poll commentators would term an ‘outlier’ — that I ‘chickened out’ of publishing the figures — something I’m sure I’ll always regret.”
“There is a pro-Labor and anti-Conservative bias in polls.”
This is playing with dynamite. Pollsters in Britain have long realized the potential polling problem created by the “shy Tory” vote — referring to those voters who don’t want to admit to pollsters that they are going against the grain of media coverage and might cast a politically incorrect vote. But this is the third time in 50 years that the shy Tories have swung an election (it also happened in 1970 and 1992). Apparently, polling companies haven’t been able to solve the problem. Chris Hanretty, the academic who advised the BBC on polling, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper that he feels “a little bit foolish,” in the wake of the election. “We categorically ruled out a [Conservative] majority. . . . We should have expected far more ‘shy Tories.’”
Pollster Stephen Fisher also told the Guardian that the problem is more complex than that. Noting that polling companies have consistently exaggerated the Labor vote since the 1970s, he concluded: “Polling companies have done a lot of work to try to counteract this, but it keeps happening. There is a pro-Labor and anti-Conservative bias in polls.”
Rem Korteeweg, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Research in London told the New York Times: “People say who they are voting for with their heart and then vote with their wallets.”
I’m not sure that’s the case, but even if it is, the problem of people giving politically correct responses to pollsters isn’t confined to Britain. As Nate Silver concluded, “Polls, in the U.K. and in other places around the world, appear to be getting worse as it becomes more challenging to contact a representative sample of voters.”
The “science” of polling has been through rough patches before, and experts have conducted reviews and done postmortems. But whatever the reason — the increased use of cell phones, the inability of pollsters to reach people, and a tendency to avoid giving politically incorrect answers to strangers on the phone — the problem isn’t close to being fixed.
Leighton Vaughan Williams, director of the Political Forecasting Unit at Nottingham Business School, sums it up: “If you really want to know a likely election result, ignore the polls and look at the betting markets. It’s a mystery why pollsters are taken more seriously.” From now on, if pollsters are to regain any credibility, they must be more transparent, spend the money to conduct real surveys, resist the temptation to withhold polls they don’t like, and realize that more and more of the public is starting to pick up a whiff of the same bias in pollsters that they detect in the media as a whole.
Labour leadership candidates like 'family members taking jewellery off a corpse'
"..... Lord Mandelson, the former business secretary, suggested on Sunday that some members of Labour's shadow cabinet should have been more vocal in raising their concerns during Labour's campaign.
After one of the leadership contenders made the disparaging "jewellery off a corpse" comment John Woodcock, a Labour MP and strong ally of Miss Kendall, described it as a "disgusting slur." ............
[snip of other highlighted quotes]......
LORD PRESCOTT, former deputy prime minister
“What a bloody disastrous night for Labour. We fought a presidential-type election based on computers, charts, focus groups and even the American language. Hell yes? Hell no! We lost this election five years ago when we failed to defend our past economic record. And it makes me damn mad.”
Tricking pollsters is always fun, and can only make conservatives work harder. But England has gone Orwell. It really could be dangerous to your job or expose you to prosecution to say the wrong thing to some pollster. Also remember that this is the UK, and the pollster could be a moslem.
The wrong truthful answer on the most crucial topics in the election could quite literally get you murdered.
Goofing on pollsters is fun. I’m usually a black, union man with a hispanic surname and a HS degree.
Yep, my arm gets a lot of exercise, picking up the phone, and slamming it back down.
We are not too far from this here in US.
What, not transgendered, too ?
The Vote means NOTHING in America.
In Nov. the GOP took the House and Senate
and the micturated on their voters,
by moving the IRS against them,
by supporting ObamaCARE after they blatantly LIED,
and by supporting every Treason they could.
Trust lost by backstabbing voters will NEVER be forgotten.
Liberals will make it a crime to lie to media pollsters.
You’ll have to ignore themm until staying silent is made a crime.
Ditto.
But I have a friend who likes to ramble on about having seen Elvis at a mall in Youngstown Ohio. He says the pollster usually hangs up pretty quickly.
I was a female Latina with 5 kids on social programs with no degree choosing a conservative.
Gosh, people being polled are lying to the pollsters? How is this so unexplained given the overt biases of the Mainstream Media? By giving the polling company bad data, you really make their polls look bad after the votes are counted and they start blubbering “why didn’t we see this and how did it happen”?
It’s why people didn’t vote for Romney, to some degree, and why even more will not vote for jeb or any other romneyesque boehmite- like or McCain substitute
".........Energy policies were not seen as a priority during recent election, but the British public knew there was a clear policy choice between the Conservatives’ support for a fracking boom in the Midlands and Labour’s determination to prevent it.
American Conservatives should take a lesson for the British election. The way to run the tables in national elections is to have the guts to risk asking the voters to choose between promises of a “New Regime” led by “Civil Society Logic” and “Government Logic,” supporting the “Market Logic” the offers prosperity and personal freedom."
It’s funny how the conservatives are labeled by the media as being out of step with the majority. Yet most of the time it turns out that the conservatives are a majority...and it is liberalism that is out of step with society.
Someone needs to get this across to the Republican leadership in the U.S. Senate.
This guy is the master at handling telemarketing calls. I stand in awe of his talent and his technique.
Why was the exit poll more accurate (gave the Tories 316 seats, they got 330), they weren’t shy then?
I don’t buy that many people are lying to pollsters. I’m glad to know, though, that the polls are often wrong because usually I find the numbers depressing.
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