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“A pollster broke down in tears” [1]

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Date: 2024-06-07  

In today’s Irish Times, a subscriber-only article appeared with the headline, “A pollster broke down in tears on Indian TV - pollsters everywhere know how he feels.” The author, Justine McCarthy, began this way:

The image that will endure after this week’s parliamentary elections in India is not of incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi claiming victory in the world’s biggest democracy but of an opinion pollster breaking down in tears on live television for getting the result spectacularly wrong. When challenged on the India Today television channel about his company’s failure, Pradeep Gupta splayed his fingers over his face and started to sob so pitifully that the studio presenter handed him a hanky.

Oh, how refreshing. McCarthy continues:

Gupta’s company, Axis My India, had forecast a harvest of up to 401 seats for Modi’s party, which only managed to win 240 – 32 seats short of a simple majority – but it was not the only pollster to misread the electorate’s mood. At least four other polling firms got it wrong too. Nor was it the first plebiscite in the world to leave polling companies with egg and tears dripping down their faces.

McCarthy explains that pollsters getting it wrong is now an international phenomenon. For example, before

the UK’s Brexit referendum in 2016, more than two-thirds of the total 168 opinion polls that were conducted predicted the majority of voters would opt to remain in the EU. As it turned out, 51.9 per cent ticked the “leave” box. That same year produced what was probably the most sensational polling flop of all when Donald Trump was elected president of the US following forecasts that his Democratic Party rival Hillary Clinton’s probability of beating him was as high as 99 per cent. Based on those opinion polls, if anyone had ammunition to malevolently fire off accusations of a “rigged election”, she did.

I don’t know where she got the 99 percent figure, but I take her point. In much of the rest of the article she discusses particular problems with polling in Europe in general and Ireland in particular. By the end she attempts to rescue her readers from her gloomy analysis by claiming that

Ireland has been well served by its polling companies but, as the population grows and advances in technology make polling more complex, its impacts on democracy need to be examined. The Taoiseach [Irish prime minister] has waxed lyrical about introducing media literacy to the school curriculum to counteract fake news. He should do it, urgently, and incorporate into it the effects opinion polls have on how we choose our political leaders.

If only we could say, with a straight face, that our nation was well served by our polling companies! Going back to the Irish Times’ headline, I’m skeptical that American pollsters really do know how Pradeep Gupta feels. To break down into tears on live national television requires a capacity for embarrassment and shame that I don’t think many Americans in the business of politics have.

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