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.
We have been vilified by the Marxists for 5 decades so who wants to tell a stranger what you think? Same thing happened in the midterm.
Pray America is waking
Leftist pollsters accurately predicting leftist election wins do not validate their models, it only validates their prejudices. Only multiple examples of their models accurately predicting wins by ideological opponents can validate their models.
SF Giants fans predicting the Giants would win the 2014 World Series before the season started does not make them brilliant baseball analysts. They got lucky.
Ditto. Long ago I stopped answering any cold-call “surveys.” You don’t have any idea who is really on the other end of the phone, nor why they really want that information. So the get immediately hung up on.
I answer the phone only if 1. I know who’s calling, and 2. I want to talk to him/her.
Robocallers seldom leave messages, BTW.
“How many guns do you own?” Nobody but nobody should ever answer that.
Yes, in UK there’s the added danger that the pollster could be a muzzie.
Goofing on pollsters is fun. I’m usually a black, union man with a hispanic surname and a HS degree
We give them absolutely no information whatsoever for any reason whatsoever
I was a female Latina with 5 kids on social programs with no degree choosing a conservative.
I don’t buy that many people are lying to pollsters
Yes, people are lying to pollsters in relatively small numbers. I'm a little playful in my responses, and I was a pollster until very recently. Far more, people are simply refusing to talk to pollsters. Talking to pollsters is becoming increasingly dangerous, and conservatives do not want to take the risk.
I get called from time to time, and I at least respond out of professional interest, even if I don't tell the truth. Gallup and Rasmussen are reasonably honest, although both have recently declined in quality (not necessarily due to lapsed integrity). Otherwise, most major polls are far more interested in maximizing revenue than they are in capturing an accurate picture of public opinion.
More than half of my polling calls have been from groups that are collecting information on the respondents as individuals more than they are collecting results to publish. Sometimes, it's just so they will know who to target in get-out-the-vote efforts, but a sensible person would not respond to such a survey. Anyone's next polling call could be collecting personal information to enforce political correctness (no different from the leftist interview that took down a pizza parlor). It's sensible not to give honest responses to the thugs on the left.
Well, obviously the answer is to have the same social pressures apply to voting as are being applied in poll questions.
If only people could be ostracized and shamed for voting in a political incorrect way, the problem would be solved.
Time to get rid of the secret ballot!
People shouldn’t be allowed to keep their bigotry hidden.
/AsALeftistWouldThink
I think it was 2004 when I got a “polling” call.
The question was phrased in such a way as to get a desired response.
I said “hey, cool! This is a push poll, isn’t it!?”
THEY hung up on ME.
you need to read between the lines in this.
They’re telling you flat out they withhold polls that show the conservative winning
And they trumpet polls thay shows the liberal winning
they’re using the polls to manipulate the results
we’ve seen this repeatedly the last 20 years
The thing about England is that its conservative resurgence is quickly replaced by more liberalism. Thatcher was able to uproot some liberalism in her eleven years.
Polls to manipulate results: it must work, considering that dozens of Philadelphia, PA, precincts voted 100 percent (not 99) Democrat against Mittens Romney.
ditto...i don’t answer the phone if i don’t know who’s on the other end
I haven’t been this stoked since your bris!!!!
It was fun!!!
You gonna go all Pol Pot on them?
Wow...just wow...
Whut ? A doctorate in fish sticks ?
ALWAYS lie to the pollsters 180o, always!
In multi-unit residential buildings (apartments, condos) I’ve noted people less often have their names on their mailboxes.
Similar trend, of not giving out personal information to strangers.
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