The closer the November 5 general election approaches, the more voters are being—and will continue to be—bombarded and confused by political polls.
Taken at face value, political polls are regarded as useful tools to give voters an idea of how particular candidates and/or political parties are performing as election day nears. These polls often have a significant influence on voters, who use them to gauge how they should vote.
But in recent years, political polls in America and other countries have been awfully wrong. As a result, political polls have been losing credibility. Voters should be mindful not to rely too heavily on them as a voting guide.
Infamously, before the 2016 presidential election, polls predicted that Democrat Hillary Clinton would win the presidency by anywhere from three to ten percentage points. The result was sharply off. Clinton lost the presidency by two percent in electoral votes, despite winning the popular vote by over three percent.
Similarly, in the 2020 general election, the average of several polls had Joe Biden winning by larger margins than he eventually won by. Several polls had Biden winning Florida, which he ultimately lost by a significant margin on election day.
It has been several years since reliable political polls, like the Gallup Poll, accurately predicted the outcome of elections. Over recent years, political polling has developed into a very competitive industry. Countless competing polls, including media polls, are published almost daily. Frankly, voters have a difficult time knowing which poll is more accurate, as none seem to be.
Today, there’s genuine concern regarding the integrity of existing polls. Political polls, like any other opinion survey, should be conducted scientifically. The people questioned in the poll should be selected by a specific sample of voters, weighted according to factors like race, age, employment status, income, gender, and zip code. From this broad sample, the potential survey targets should be randomly selected by established guidelines. From the final filtered sample, the poll is then conducted—whether by phone, mail, face-to-face, or today, via the Internet.
But it’s seriously doubtful that polls are being conducted based on scientifically selected samples. Often, scientific samples take time to finalize. However, the frequency with which some of the current polls are conducted makes it nearly impossible for them to be based on scientific sampling.
Another factor that’s challenging the integrity of political polling is the scarcity of telephone landlines. In the past, it was easier for political pollsters to select polling samples from a telephone directory. Printed telephone directories are now almost obsolete, as many consumers have canceled their landlines in favor of cell phones. There’s no publicly available cellphone directory, although it may be possible to get directories of customers from respective cellphone companies.
Since cell phones have a caller ID feature, consumers rarely answer calls from numbers they don’t recognize. Often, calls from pollsters are interpreted as another annoying solicitation and go unanswered. Moreover, when pollsters do reach someone via cellphone or landline, there’s a tendency for the call to be cut short as some people simply don’t want to be bothered. A representative of a popular polling company said the contact rate for polling calls averages around ten percent.
Another negative factor is that pollsters cannot be certain of the reliability of the responses they receive. Some people deliberately give pollsters answers that don’t reflect how they actually plan to vote.
The fact that over 40 percent of American voters are registered as Independents (NPA) also diminishes the accuracy of polls. Independent voters are vulnerable to political messages and circumstances, frequently changing their minds before voting. They are notoriously unreliable when it comes to the accuracy of their stated voting choices.
It’s suspected that some pollsters deliberately and skillfully skew polls to influence voters in specific political districts and races. Some voters see polls showing a candidate leading and use that information to vote for the candidate. Others may see their preferred candidate trailing and, thinking their vote would be wasted, decide not to vote.
In the upcoming presidential elections, voters are urged to cast their ballots based on the policies candidates propose—how they perceive a candidate can improve their standard of living and that of their families—not on what the polls forecast. There are too many reasons to doubt polling accuracy for voters to rely on them. A vote is too precious and too hard-won to waste. Voters should take care not to be duped by political polls.
