In a world where information is readily available everywhere and changes are happening at a
dizzying pace, polls have become a political and commercial weapon.
Whether it’s to gain votes or sell products, getting to know voters or customers’ tastes,
preferences, and concerns, is usually highly recommended.
Don’t believe me?
Check this out.
John F. Kennedy was the first White House candidate who used and really relied on polls
to prepare his campaign strategy.
Kennedy's team systematically used surveys to discover and analyze voters’ opinions
and concerns... in such a way that they’d be able to adapt the future president’s
political discourse to these issues.
For example, one of the surveys with which Kennedy's team worked revealed that only 30%
of families could send their children to university, but that 80% of families still dreamed of
being able to do it someday.
Do you know what Kennedy did then?
He insisted in his speeches, again and again, that education was a priority for him and
that he’d improve training opportunities for every family’s children.
The public responded well to this message.
But that wasn’t all…
As you know, John F. Kennedy was Catholic, which wasn’t very well received in the time’s
Protestant regions, which is why many Protestant voters weren’t willing to vote for him.
Well, the Kennedy team decided to use the polls to decide which states the candidate
would visit during the presidential campaign.
That way, they left out no less than 30 states, many of them precisely because of the voters’
reluctance to vote for a Catholic candidate.
Thus, the Kennedy Campaign team was able to concentrate all its efforts on states that
had real chances.
And as you know, Kennedy became President.
As you can see, polls are a powerful weapon for drawing political and business strategies.
That’s why, since Kennedy, the vast majority of politicians have had a great fondness for
surveys and demographic studies.
Knowledge is power.
And... not only that, but polls have also acquired another ability… to influence the
decision-making process.
That is, polls can actually gain votes or clients by themselves.
Whether by useful voting, compromising, coattail effect voting... it doesn’t matter... usually
when a survey says that something is in high demand... its natural demand tends to grow...
Even though it may never reach the survey’s levels.
It’s exactly due to this effect, that politicians and many companies are so addicted to continuously
making surveys of all kinds.
However, surveys aren’t always conducted as they should be... and that has led to some
occasional huge mistakes.
(THE GREAT MISTAKES)
Over the years, political polls have left behind a huge trail of flaws and mistakes
of galactic proportions.
Perhaps one of the best known happened in 1936.
See, presidential elections were being held in the United States that year, and the magazine
"Literary Digest", which was one of the most important in the world at the time, carried
out a macro- survey, one of the largest and most expensive surveys of all time.
The sample included almost 2 and a half million people.
With that data in hand, the magazine determined that, without a doubt, Alfred Landon, the
Republican governor of Kansas, would become the new president of the United States of
America.
He’d defeat the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt by more than 14 points.
This is what the survey stated, but as you all know, the truth was quite different.
Roosevelt utterly destroyed his rival, beating him by more than 24 points and of course,
became the new tenant of the White House.
Since then, folks, the surveys of the magazine "Literary Digest" are considered nonsense,
demographic studies full of errors and bias.
Come on, this magazine’s surveys should be used as a manual of how not to conduct
surveys.
But don’t think that was the only resounding mistake, not at all, history has loads of
examples.
Look, just a few years before, the 1948 campaign pitted Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt’s
successor, against the Republican New York State governor Thomas Dewey, who’d become
tremendously popular for his persecution of organized crime, specifically for his war
with the capo Lucky Luciano.
The fact is that Thomas Dewey was the big favorite to win the elections.
All the polls presented him as the clear winner, and even some newspapers jumped ahead to calling
him President Dewey.
The difference between both candidates seemed so great that one of the country's leading
survey experts, Elmo Roper, said he wasn’t going to do any more polls, or surveys or
anything like that.
It wasn’t worth speculating with something so obvious.
Dewey would be president.
Well... once again, history turned out differently.
Truman won the elections by more than 2 million votes.
Look at this picture.
Yes, it shows the United States president, Harry Truman with a copy of the first edition
of the Chicago Daily Tribune whose headline reads “Dewey defeats Truman”.
Yes, the journalists thought it was such a safe choice that they prepared the news before
the vote.
Can you imagine the newspaper’s editor’s face?
But... just a second, these big mistakes don’t exclusively come from the United States.
For example, there are the British elections of 1992.
All the polls showed a clear victory for the Labor Party.
Undoubtedly after 13 years in power the time of the conservatives was coming to an end.
But... once again, the reality was quite different... and the conservative John Major took over
Downing Street.
Check out the huge difference between theory and reality.
The fact is that we could spend a lot of time commenting on all the macro-mistakes that
surveys have made...
But... let's go back to the initial question: having seen all this, can we trust polls?
(CAN WE TRUST THEM?)
We’ve seen some of the biggest mistakes that surveys have made in our history...
however, democopy – that is the study that uses surveys to assess society’s opinions,
tastes and behaviors – has evolved a lot... and the truth is that it’s pretty efficient...
I mean, it works.
Look, a study conducted by professors from the University of Southampton and the University
of Texas, analyzed more than 30,000 surveys for 351 general elections in 45 different
countries between 1942 and 2017.
In the study, the authors compared what the surveys said with what actually happened.
Well, based on the results… here’s a question.
Do you know what percentage of the more than 30,000 surveys analyzed had a failure higher
than their margin of error?
20, 30?
No…
2%.
Only 2% of all surveys.
And in addition, the results also showed that accuracy has improved over the years.
But... yes, I know.
It’s a fact.
Donald Trump’s victory against what the polls prophesied was, for many, irrefutable
proof that polls are useless.
For example, the Princeton Consortium gave Hillary Clinton a 99% chance of winning.
The New York Times was a bit more cautious, setting the probability at 85%.
Maybe all these things explain why according to polls – wait a second, polls?
Well let’s assume they’ve become more accurate – only 26% of likely US voters,
1 in 4, trust most political polls.
And of course... taking what happened in the last presidential campaign into account, they
seem to have a good reason to do so, right?
But... just a moment...
Did the surveys really fail that badly in 2016?
Well, the answer may differ a bit from what we saw at first.
Yes, it is true, the elections were won by the candidate that the polls determined would
be the loser and it’s precisely due to this fact that many experts are studying what went
wrong and many theories have been set on the table:
What if Trump’s voters tend to answer fewer surveys; what if the response rate is very
low and in the end only those who answer are accounted for; what if the probability of
correlated errors wasn’t played out well, etcetera, etcetera.
And yes, some of these matters will "pollute" the result...
But just a second, not so fast.
If we take a look at the results that the surveys had estimated, there actually weren’t
that many mistakes.
You see, the polls predicted that Hillary would win the popular vote by about 3 points...
and in fact, Hillary won the popular vote by more than 2 points.
But as you all know, the candidate with the most votes doesn’t always win the elections
in the United States.
The one who gets the most state delegates does.
It was right at this point, when determining which state each candidate would win in, that
the error in forecasting the winner was caused.
Anyway, as you can see… the mistake wasn’t that huge.
And that’s taking into account that electoral polls are particularly difficult, perhaps
the most difficult, not only because we need to determine the favorite candidate, but also
how many of the people interviewed will eventually vote and how they’ll vote on that precise
day.
The truth folks, is that surveys are very accurate when it comes to determining what
the general perception of a particular issue or subject is.
That’s why they’re so important for politicians and companies.
And yes, they may include a few mistakes, in fact survey results come with a margin
of error...
But as we’ve seen, the evidence tells us that the real result in the vast majority
of cases is usually within that margin of error.
And also, let's not forget how important trends are.
“For example, it's like a thermometer exposed to the sun in Gran Vía that marks 300 degrees.
It’s not 300 degrees, but if you come by tomorrow and it's 320 degrees, you know something:
it's hotter than yesterday” Pablo Simón, Politikon)
But now it's your turn, do you trust polls?
Leave your answer in the comments as well as in the survey.
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the vocals in this episode that were not mine.
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