This is the end of industrial political polling as we know it

Newsbeat

Well, folks, this should be the end of industrial political polling as we know it. Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump began his tilt at the presidency as an outlier, and even as recently as voting day was characterised by many pollsters as the likely loser by a long shot. Now he is the US president elect, an outcome that most mainstream observers regard as an astonishing upset. Comparisons with the Brexit surprise abound. The result underscores how badly modern polls serve us. Polling is an enormous, lucrative and influential industry–Australia has lost sitting prime ministers over poll results. But the US election outcome shows how unreliable polls can they be at predicting our political futures. Many pollsters are now eating humble pie. Sam Wang, the widely-lauded pollster behind the Princeton Election Consortium website, was only recently so confident of a Clinton win that he tweeted: As the votes for Trump rolled in, Wang wrote that he’s getting ready for “bug-cookery”, saying that “the polls were off, massively”. In the late hours of voting day in the US, Wang wrote: The entire polling industry – public, campaign-associated, aggregators – ended up with data that missed tonight’s results by a very large margin. There is now the question of understanding how a mature industry could have gone so wrong. And of course, most of all, there is the shock of a likely Trump presidency. I apologize that I underestimated the possibility of such an event. Nate Silver, who uses statistical analysis to crunch poll data on the website FiveThirtyEight and famously called the outcome of the 2012 election correctly, was less confident than Wang of a Clinton presidency. But FiveThirtyEight did tip Clinton as the likely winner: Nate Silver seemed to grow reflective as the results became obvious on the evening of voting day: In the space of a few hours, GOP pollster Frank Luntz went from predicting a Clinton win to declaring Trump the likely next president: He wrote on Twitter that exit polling margins “were way off”. Polling used to be a lot easier. Polling emerged for sound economic and political reasons. On the economic side, advertisers needed a trusted way of reading the customer mind, so they could design products and develop media plans to sell them. On the political side, legislators, political candidates and planners needed reliable means of reading the citizen mind, not only for elections but also for everyday policy affairs from welfare to housing provision. Not surprisingly, early polling methodology experts understood that devious people or organisations might attempt to distort the outcomes of ratings and polls. In advertising, companies that subscribed to ratings and actively tried to distort them would be threatened with removal from the subscription and banned from accessing ratings.