As the US prepares to vote for its new president next week, narrowing political polls have suggested that this crucial election may be too close to call.
Although such polls are hugely influential – affecting – it is becoming clear that we should not set too much store by them. Their reliability is increasingly doubted in the wake of polls that got it wrong on big occasions, such as those relating to the and , and securing the Republican party nomination in the US.
Why might that be? These days, pollsters find it harder to get responses by calling voters on their home phones. A typical telephone survey now has a response rate of , with fewer willing interviewees making the polls less likely to be representative of the wider voter population and, hence, less precise and reliable.
Advertisement
Telephone polls are usually carried out during the day, biasing the results towards stay-at-home parents, retirees and the unemployed. Most people, for some reason, do not respond to cellphone surveys as eagerly as they once did to those by landline.
have their own weaknesses: they tend to be towards particular voter groups, such as the young, better-educated and urban dwellers.
In both types of survey, pollsters try to , but the results of doing so can be dubious – when four different pollsters gave four different results for the key swing state of Florida in the current US campaign based on the same data set. Furthermore, a that the actual margin of error of a poll’s finding is about 7 per cent, instead of the typically reported 3 per cent. Not surprisingly, that opinion polls are more art than science.
Turning to science
Putting polling back on a scientific footing will require experiments in the coming years, combining insights from various branches of sociology, economics, mathematics of networks and statistics.
I am one of a group of researchers at Oraclum, a in Cambridge, UK, involved in . Our new kind of poll is conducted online, meaning we have to make election predictions from unrepresentative and biased samples of voters.
However, that we hope will improve its power to predict an election outcome, in that we go beyond asking people who they will vote for. We also ask who they think will win and their view on who other people think will win. The idea is to incorporate wider influences, including peer groups, that shape an individual’s choice on voting day.
Why might this work? When people make choices, such as in elections, they usually succumb to their standard ideological preference. However, they also weigh up the chance that their favoured choice has. In other words, they think about . This is why people sometimes vote strategically and do not always pick their first choice, but can opt for the second or third to prevent their least-preferred option from winning.
It is going to take a fair few experiments to answer the question of whether contemporary polling can be considered scientific.
And though the current US election is widely condemned for its negative atmosphere, it provides a good chance for a new science of polling to begin to take shape.
If you are a US voter, you can help Oraclum test its polling method by and sharing it with your friends
