Left Coast Views
columnist: William Westmiller

Topic: Presidential Campaign 2008
Live Free and Kill the Pollsters

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Everyone believed the polls. Hillary couldn’t win New Hampshire, she would lose really, really big. It prompted a whimper, humility, and sadness. Until the voters said otherwise.

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by William Westmiller
(Libertarian)
Friday, January 11, 2008

The prophets had spoken. The fix was in. Hillary would lose the New Hampshire primary. It was just a scientific fact: there was no hope. There was a great wail and a bitter gnashing of teeth within the Clinton dynastic compounds. But, surprise: reality said otherwise. Granite State voters killed the pollster's credibility. It should have been dead long ago.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics bit the dust on January 8^th. The pollsters will carefully protest that they have never claimed prescience; they never really intended to foretell the future. But, they do claim the mantle of being able to offer a "scientific revelation" of the current, true sentiments of voters. That's a pure fable.

Here's what all the major pollsters had to say the day before the election, with the actual results shown at the top (thanks to Real Clear Politics for the summary):

Nearly all of these polls "predicted" a huge lead for Obama. The tallies, just a day or two before the primary, weren't just outside the "margin of sampling error," they weren't even in the ballpark. What went wrong? Why is it very important?

The reality of the matter is that pollsters prompt, push, and coddle participants to make a "cost-free" choice among named candidates. Only rarely do they disclose whether the participants were leaning, inclined, or committed to a candidate. It doesn't matter what they report, because the pollster has no idea whether they are telling the truth. The participants can say they're committed to voting for Mickey Mouse and the phone attendants will dutifully record whatever they say. Undoubtedly, there were many voters in New Hampshire that had had enough of the hourly calls from every candidate and simply responded to the pollsters in spite. It costs them nothing to lie and they're assured that their identity will never be disclosed. Lying to pollsters entails no commitment whatever.

What is well established by every academic study is that the vast majority of eventual voters do not make up their minds until the final days, even hours, of an election. If pollsters really wanted to offer an accurate picture of voter sentiment, they would show the "undecided" voters on every list. Some pollsters do report that number in the fine print. Most don't even ask or allow such a response. In any case, the voter choices (if they ever do actually vote), are reported as a portion of 100% of the total vote, even if only 10% have made up their minds. It's simply fraud.

The reason they do that is that they are being paid to produce headlines, not reality. The sponsors of the polls want a "horserace," mortal combat, an exciting up and down tussle between the forces of good and evil. It doesn't matter that the pollsters know that they're mainly reporting name recognition, celebrity status, and frivolous voter sentiments. The sponsors want headlines, hard numbers, day-to-day surges, plunges, fades, and jabs. That's what gets them readers and viewers. That's how they make their money.

Let me make it clear that there's absolutely nothing wrong with providing consumers with information. The problem is that pollsters and media sponsors are selling lies.

The entire scientific basis for public opinion polling is built on the assumption that it is possible to take a random sample of people who may or may not take some future action. That population doesn't exist. Neither the pollster, nor the participant, have any idea whether or not those registrants will actually cast a ballot at some future time. There is no actual "larger population" from which the pollster can draw their sample. Therefore, every "scientific extrapolation" of the responses is a fabrication.

Let's be clear: poll results are better than any random guess. There is some information hidden in the numbers. It's just that the pollsters have no idea which numbers are true, nor which are false. Their credibility depends on the misunderstanding of readers about probability distribution. Given any X number of candidates, it's always true that each of them is likely to get 1/X voter support. If there are three candidates, each will get 33.3% of the vote, purely on the basis of random odds. Therefore, the only significant numbers are the variation from those odds. But, pollsters readily admit that their results have a plus or minus three to five percent error. In other words, they can never (almost never) lose. Any number in the range is (scientifically speaking) is just as true as any other number.

Of course, what gains attention are the "hard numbers," changing from day to day. The sponsors don't want to report that "maybe Hillary is slightly ahead of Obama, or maybe she's slightly behind, we really don't know."

Readers may chide me for using academic surveys to make the point, but their primary conclusion has been confirmed in thousands of studies over many years. People want to vote for a winner. About 75% of voters select the candidate that they believe will win the election. They want to be on the "right team" when the hurrahs are proclaimed. Many of them have no idea what the candidates stand for and don't really care. If they are celebrities, novelties, popular, and attractive, they are probably winners. The same effect was seen in New Hampshire, where Democrats voted the candidate they though would win. Here are the results of CNN exit polls:

In other words, a huge majority of voters cast their vote based on what they are told by the media, pumping the hard numbers provided by pollsters. In this case, most people (44%) assumed that Obama would win, but the minority voted overwhelmingly (87%) for Hillary - because they really believed she would win.

Now, here's the problem: who decides the "likely" winner? Who determines whether a person is a political celebrity or a viable candidate? Who proclaims the "current leaders" in any contest? The answer is obvious: the insider media pundits make that decision, based on their opinion polls.

We are only fortunate that the pollsters don't decide elections. We are fortunate that many voters do take the time to learn about all the candidates and the issues. We are fortunate that retail politics, one-on-one meetings, and issue positions do have an impact. The responsible citizens of New Hampshire have shown the pollsters and their media sponsors where to stick their numbers. We can only hope that many more people will ignore the horserace, inform themselves, and vote their consciences. If they don't, we might as well hand over all the ballots to the professional fabricators who call themselves pollsters.

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Update1: An obscene, irreverant, ad-hominem, and delicious attack on one perverse pollster, from Penn & Teller.

Update2: The South Carolina Democratic primary polls were even worse than New Hampshire: 55.6% vs. RCP average of 38.4% for Obama. Looks like a 17.2% Margin of Sampling Error. I'm absolutely sure (not) that RCP will now inform their readers of this factual error margin in all of their future reports.

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2008 William Westmiller, all rights reserved.
Published: Friday, January 11, 2008
Last modified: Sunday, January 27, 2008

The views expressed in this article are those of William Westmiller only and do not represent the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. William Westmiller is solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.

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