ONE of the most iconic moments in American politics occurred on November 3, 1948, the day after Harry S. Truman was reelected president. Truman was photographed holding a copy of that day’s Chicago Daily Tribune with the banner headline “Dewey Defeats Truman”.
New York Governor Thomas Dewey was defeated in an election that was not close (49.6 percent to 45.1 percent), although virtually every prediction indicated that Truman would lose. On the morning of the 2016 US presidential elections, the New York Times headlined that “Hillary Clinton has an 85 percent chance to win.”
Opinion pollsters would like us to believe that decades of experience means that these polls are valid based on the statistical sampling science. You only need to survey a limited number of people to accurately reflect what the total population is thinking. Reality tells a different story.
“Shy Tory factor” is a name given to a phenomenon first observed by British opinion polling companies in the early 1990s. It was found that the share of the vote won by the Conservative Party (known as the “Tories”) was significantly higher than the share in opinion polls. The accepted explanation was that so-called shy Tories were voting Conservative after telling pollsters they would not. The general elections held in 1992 and 2015 also demonstrated this.
Tom Bradley, Los Angeles mayor for 20 years, was an African-American who lost the 1982 California governor’s race despite being ahead in polls. The “Bradley effect” is a theory concerning observed discrepancies between opinion polls and election outcomes where a white candidate and a nonwhite candidate run against each other. Some white voters give inaccurate polling responses for fear that they will be criticized of racial motivation.
The current opinion polls on the upcoming Senate race has led some to say that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) should stop survey companies from releasing preelection survey results. Another comment is that these opinion polls are conditioning the mind of the electorate to accept a particular outcome.
There is a huge amount of hypocrisy for a candidate to bash opinion polls. A critical job of a campaign manager is to use polls to discover where the candidate has weak numbers. If a Senate hopeful is losing the votes of jeepney drivers or performing poorly in a vote-rich province, within a few days there will be a campaign stop to talk to the jeepney drivers in that province.
Campaign managers also fear that their candidate who has a strong lead may lose some voters who go for their “second choice,” since their “first choice” is “guaranteed” to win.
Despite criticizing the opinion polls, candidates are quick to “thank the voters” when he or she moves up in the poll rankings.
These surveys are sometimes flawed, can be used to push a political agenda and may or may not sway public opinion. However, they do offer a necessary insight into how the election process is proceeding. Since candidates use this information, the public also has a right to know the results.