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.
Perhaps this means the end of the political correctness social movement. One can hope.
Interesting article
You can imagine the poll-taking process: "Hello, Mr. Peasant, I'm an inquisitive and frightening stranger. God knows who I work for. Would you care to ostensibly support the dictatorship which controls every facet of your existence, or shall we put you down as in favor of the UNO opposition and just tear up your ration card right here and now?
Me: "I'm old, and pissed that this isn't my world anymore."
Welcome to mortified Britain: Full of young Tories who secretly hate themselves "David Cameron may have won another term but his young supporters are still too embarrassed to tell anyone they voted Tory. Radhika Sanghani shines a light on the Conversatives stuck in the political closet"
" When I was at university in London during the last general election, the only acceptable parties to vote for sat firmly on the left of the political spectrum.
The Lib Dems, Labour and Greens all had the unofficial student seal of approval. Voting Conservative was akin to social suicide.
Right-wingers either joined ‘Conservative Soc’ and resigned themselves to three years of not being invited to the student union, or suppressed their natural austerity instincts and learnt to love benefits.
They had little choice – this was the student status quo, and it helped propel the Lib Dems into the coalition.
Fast-forward five years and, lo and behold, we have an entirely right-wing Government. The Conservatives have won the election without a hung Parliament in sight.
What's more, contrary to the rules of student life, they’ve got there with the help of the ‘yoof’.
New polls suggest a slight rise amongst 18-34 year olds voting for the Tories since 2010 – particularly among women............."
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FR thread linked to: Kevin Williamson's insightful piece: "Generation Vexed: The downwardly mobile Millennials may be waking up at last"
"...............Conservatives will never out-snark, out-mock, or out-tweet the popular culture that embraced Barack Obama as a semi-religious icon. But Millennials are right at the beginning of what promises to be an unpleasant, extended encounter with the facts of life, and it may be that they will soon figure out that there is more to understanding those facts than snark and emojis. Mocking them would be easy, while persuading them will prove difficult and frustrating, because conservatism, unromantic disposition that it is, is in the end an exercise in calculating a balance of human imperfections. The Millennials do not understand that — not quite yet."
A classic on white guilt. A must read - a real keeper.
The perils of designer tribalism
".........What Bruckner criticizes as Third Worldism, Sandall castigates as “romantic primitivism” and (marvelous phrase) “designer tribalism.” What is romantic primitivism? In the words of Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, it is “the unending revolt of the civilized against civilization.” Sandall begins with a small but telling contemporary example. In 1996, the actress Lauren Hutton took her two young boys to Africa to witness a bunch of Masai warriors and their witch doctor perform a tribal dance, slaughter a cow, and drink some warm blood straight from the carcass. The whole spectacle was captured for the television audience by Ted Turner’s minions. Miss Hutton loved it: according to Sandall, “Wow!” was her frequent refrain. But her young children, one of whom burst into tears, were terrified. Quite right, too. The purpose of the television show was to show that “Masai culture is just as good as Western civilization, if not better.” Miss Hutton’s enthusiasm was sparked by the display of “authentic” tribal passion. But her children saw the episode for what it was: a glimpse into the heart of darkness, the abyss of uncivilized barbarism.
What Sandall describes as “the culture cult” dreams of a new simplicity: a mode of existence that is somehow less encumbered, less rent by conflicting obligations than life in a modern industrialized democracy. It is a vain endeavor. The romanticization of the primitive only emphasizes one’s distance from its simplicities. Romanticism in all its forms is an autumnal, retrospective phenomenon: the more fervent it is, the more it underscores the loss it laments. “It is time,” Sandall writes, “to stop dreaming about going back to the land or revisiting the social arrangements of the past.” Miss Hutton’s happy ejaculations were prompted by such dreams. What she heard among those Masai savages as they danced about and drank blood was Pascal Bruckner’s “enchanting music of departure.” But it is, alas, a departure to nowhere. As Sandall observes, life is about “ever-extending complexity.” To deny that is to neglect the “Big Ditch” (Ernest Gellner’s term) that separates the modern world from its primitive sources. On one side of the ditch is the rule of law, near universal literacy, modern technology, and the whole panoply of liberal democratic largess. On the other side is— what? “Most traditional cultures,” Sandall writes, “feature domestic repression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism, and severe artistic constraints. If you want to live a full life and die in your bed, then civilization—not romantic ethnicity—deserves your thoughtful vote.” ...............
Lol. They made a movie about that: “No World for Old Men”
Until the liberals see how much it would cost to bet heavy on the democrats and skew the odds. Be on the lookout for betting pools with a very small capitalization and an inordinate promotion in the press.
Oops. That should be “No Country for Old Men”
Yeah I was feeling a bit Abe Simpson then. My 5 year old Set Top Box (driving a 45 year old TV) had died, and my local mall had no place where either could be purchased). And why are the only digital watches now “sports watches” (I’ll go now)
LOL. That was a classic. That guy is talented. I wish I was quick witted like that.
... 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.
A whiff? A stench. A stench like tuna salad left in the trunk of a car parked in the sun for a week.
Darn right. More and more folks won’t provide any information whatsoever. Add to that the problem with land lines going away and polls become pretty much anything the pollsters want them to be.
The vote has meant little in the US for some time. I’ll make a prediction of the 2016 election right now: the uniparty wins in a landslide. As they have every election since the 19th century.
I blame the “No H8” campaign in California and others like it.
People’s lives have been ruined because they supported the politically incorrect candidate or position. When a pollster calls me on the phone, he already has my name, telephone number and home address. How do I know he is not some Progressive partisan looking for the next Memories Pizza?
Why would I take the risk by telling the truth?
This is why I would love to see no exit polls and no polling televised 30 days before an election. Voters were "badly served"? No, they were intentionally manipulated, which is all polling is about these days.
What has taken place in the UK could be a preview of the USA’s 2016 Presidential elections, a conservative resurgence.
In the sense that for decades polling has been a tool of the left, this is simply a good thing that had to happen, sooner or later.
I’ve been particularly interested in how opinion polling has been used to prop up a failed ideology. Being a failed ideology, the leftist psyche requires constant affirmation that they are in the majority on many issues that they simply are not.
Polling acts as a soothing salve for the wrong beliefs, wounded constantly by events and reality.
All war is based on deception. Conservatives the world over are most definitely at war with the leftists, and that includes the media and pollsters.
I don't think this proves any trend until it is shown that in national presidential elections the polls are off.
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