In November, people gathered around their televisions and laptops to see the results of the 2016 Presidential election. As the night wore on, it seemed that almost all of the pollsters were wrong. Dead wrong. Instead of a Hillary Clinton landslide, there was a Donald Trump victory. According to The Daily Caller's News Foundation Investigative Group, however, the pollsters haven't learned a thing:
“I do know inherently there is a Democratic bias in the polls. And most of them will deny it” says Raghavan Mayur, an independent pollster who is president of TechnoMetrica, which leads the polling operations at Investor’s Business Daily.
A national financial news organization, IBD was one of the few polling organizations to predict a Trump victory, and it has accurately called the last four presidential elections.
“Typically, the mainstream media and the major polling companies will never admit their bias to you,” Mayur said. “This is like an alcoholic not admitting to using alcohol. They are in denial.”
Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell agreed with Mayur, saying “there was a couple of days of shock. And then they moved on because what they could not do is to get to the bottom of their own polling bias.”
Caddell was chief pollster for liberal Democratic presidential candidates George McGovern in 1972, President Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, former Sen. Gary Hart in 1984, then-Sen. Joe Biden in 1988 and California Gov. Jerry Brown in 1992. More recently, Caddell became a Fox News contributor.
The American Association for Public Opinion Research called pollsters' inaccurate 2016 predictions a “jarring event,” but that discomfort hasn't caused them to actually re-evaluate or change their practices. So, if they haven't learned their lesson, should we totally ignore their reports? John Zogby, the founder of Zogby poll and a senior partner at John Zogby Strategies, said, "I am a liberal Democrat, but I always felt that other polls oversampled Democrats and undersampled Republicans." Could it be that many pollsters do this intentionally to possibly deflate the momentum that conservatives would otherwise feel if they knew they were actually ahead instead of desperately behind?
On Tuesday, both ABC and CNN said President Trump is "the most unfavorable incoming president in modern history." But before you run to Twitter to tweet this fake news, realize that the pollsters once again oversampled Democrats.
It seems that pollsters are less interested in reporting on the attitudes and presuppositions of voters than in controlling them.
Image Credit: Secretlondon123 (Flickr: polling station) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
