Polling titan Gallup has decided to withdraw from the US presidential primaries and may
even sit out the general election.
Perhaps it’s not too surprising, given that they predicted Mitt Romney would beat Barack
Obama in 2012 and instead he lost by about a 4 point margin.
Over the past few decades, polling has become increasingly inaccurate.
With the upcoming 2016 election it’s important to know, why do polls get it wrong so often?
Well, there are a number of reasons why polling accuracy has declined.
For one, cell phones are on the rise, while fewer and fewer people use landlines.
Why would this be a problem?
Cell phones can’t be autodialed according to the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection
Act.
In order to call someone’s cell phone, a live person needs to be the one to do it.
For every thousand respondents, it takes about 20,000 calls to random numbers, most of which
are non working numbers.
This is incredibly expensive and as a result, some polls don’t include cell phones.
And since younger people, lower income Americans and minority groups often only use cell phones,
they are extremely under-represented, compared to older, white people who still rely on landlines.
Another problem with polling is the reticence to even state an opinion.
Polls now have extremely low response rates.
Back in the late 1970’s, an 80% response rate was considered acceptable.
By 2012, the Pew Research Center reported that that number had dropped to 9%.
Some say this is due to fears over privacy and confidentiality.
It’s pretty tough to determine the pulse of a nation when relatively few people seem
interested in sharing their opinions.
But polling inaccuracy extends past the phone line.
Internet polls come with their own set of problems.
Most significantly, they do not account for a relevant group of responders.
While 93% of 18-29 year olds in the US use the internet, in the 2014 midterm elections,
only 13% of that age group showed up to vote.
Meanwhile, more likely voters have considerably lower rates of internet use, rendering online
polls a poor representation of public opinion.
Another huge issue is the influence of early polling.
Early polls tend not to correlate with final results, as most respondents have not had
the time to learn about new candidates or issues.
But those early polls are frequently the only source of information available for preliminary
media coverage.
So uninformed polls leading to glorified coverage causes a cyclical interest level.
Potential respondents see the media talking about early poll frontrunners, which influences
them to voice a stronger opinion, and thus possibly skew future polls.
We’ve already seen this happening in the 2016 primaries.
For example, online polls showed that Bernie Sanders was the winner of the first Democratic
debate.
However in more traditional phone based polls, Hillary Clinton came out ahead.
But inaccurate polling isn’t just a problem in the US.
The most recent election in the UK predicted that the conservative party would barely win
by 1% which could have wreaked havoc on parliament, but election results saw them winning by about
37% to the opposition’s 31%.
With so many issues surrounding polling methods, it’s best to take them with a hefty grain
of salt.
While polling isn’t as reliable as it used to be, you can make up your mind for yourself
about upcoming presidential candidates by watching our playlist.
If you want to see more of a tongue-in-cheek take on politics, check out my channel Newsy
News.
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