The founder of our Stones Cry Out group blog, Rick Brady, was much more a student of polling than I, but I wanted to give a few observations of my own, such as they are.<\/p>\n
The science of polling the general public has had its good and bad times, and it appears it\u2019s going through one of those rough patches at the moment. Mark Olson, who also blogs here, refers to polls as \u201ccricket races\u201d; basically a snapshot of where things are in a particular race, that has as much bearing on our lives as a race amongst crickets. If it\u2019s a slow news day, release the results from a poll, and call it news.<\/p>\n
Some might put the word \u201cscience\u201d in the phrase \u201cscience of polling\u201d in scare quotes, not convinced that it\u2019s much of a science at all. I do have some respect for those whose lives are in various statistical occupations. It seems like a black art, but, for example, one pharmaceutical client I worked for years ago had a Quality Assurance group that tested the products coming into the warehouse before they could be shipped out, and they explained quite a bit to me. I couldn\u2019t relate what they said now \u2013 I really can\u2019t remember it all \u2013 but basically, given a good random sample, they could give you a good reading on whether or not the batch that just came in was good enough to ship out. Yeah, the only way to be totally sure was to test it all, but to get close enough to 100% sure without going overboard, there was a lot of science backing up their procedures.<\/p>\n
Sampling people<\/em>, on the other hand, is nowhere near as straightforward as sampling pharmaceuticals. People can say one thing, and yet do another. Which apparently happened in a big way over in the UK recently, when the conservative Tories trounced the liberal Labor Party in national elections, gaining their first outright majority since 1992. This even though Nate Silver, the US polling expert, had a look at all the UK polls and proclaimed that a Tory win of a majority of seats in Parliament was \u201cvanishingly small when the polls closed – around 1 in 500.\u201d<\/p>\n So much for that prediction. But the predictive value of polls is lessened when the pollsters themselves hide some of their results. It happened in the UK, and it happens quite a bit, apparently. No pollster wants to publish results that wind up being way out of line with those from other polls. No one wants to be the outlier, but that\u2019s what happened in the UK. A last-minute poll by one group got the percentages virtually dead on to what the voting results were, but they didn\u2019t publish it, \u201cchickening out\u201d, as the group\u2019s CEO explained. It\u2019s a herd mentality that we see in news coverage as well.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What this herd mentality gets us are reporters that cover stories because<\/em> other reporters are covering them. And because journalists tend to lean liberal and vote Democratic, it\u2019s stories on the Left that get more coverage. That\u2019s where the herd migrates. As I\u2019ve mentioned before, that situation is fertile ground for a network like Fox News that will get the scoop on stories on the Right, because the herd is busy elsewhere.<\/p>\n So then, do pollsters migrate that way? Turns out, yes, they do. In the UK, polling companies have consistently exaggerated the liberal side of the equation since the 1970s. Try as they might to correct for this, it just keeps happening. Is this a liberal bias, exactly? Well, my question would be that, if it isn\u2019t bias, wouldn\u2019t you think that errors like this would happen in both directions and equalize themselves out? But it so often seems to get tilted one direction. If it\u2019s not<\/em> bias, then what is it?<\/p>\n In the UK, they have a group of voters they call \u201cshy Tories\u201d; people who give politically correct answers to pollsters, but then vote conservative anyway. This is one of the problems with the speech police that shun those who don\u2019t tow the PC line; polls get skewed. This is not just a problem in the UK, either. Silver notes that it\u2019s happening more and more across the globe. Not surprisingly, the Western World\u2019s culture keeps getting more and more liberal, and while those on the Right may wish to say<\/em> the right to avoid the hassle, at least voting is still done by secret ballot.<\/p>\n But can \u201cshy conservatives\u201d really explain decades of error that are so lopsided in showing an advantage to the Left? The big question is; if it isn\u2019t pollster bias, how would all this look any different if it was<\/em>?<\/p>\n Given such problems with polling, whatever the reason, how does this affect our politics? James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has speculated that liberal bias in news reporting can cause liberal politicians to underestimate the problems that their policy decisions are causing. The same thing goes for polling that tends to hide the conservative displeasure at those policies. Liberal politicians get an overly rosy view of how things are going, and thus, as Taranto suggests, make unforced errors regarding policies or campaigning because they don\u2019t have a true picture.<\/p>\n Skewed polling can cut both ways, and is a disservice to all voters. An inflated poll number for a liberal politician could cause liberal voters to stay home, thinking their guy is inevitable, or it could cause conservative voters to stay home, thinking their guy is already doomed. Or both these conditions could occur, depressing voter turnout in general, and giving the few who do show up control over the many.<\/p>\n Of course the lesson there is, forget the polls and get out there and vote.<\/p>\n Another lesson is that commentators aren\u2019t the best people to be telling political parties what lessons to learn. Here\u2019s NBC\u2019s Chuck Todd noting some of them.<\/p>\n