GALLUP AWAY

Notes of Concern…

   …Jack Blair

GALLUP AWAY

Have you been watching the science of polling lately?  There have been some major mistakes and in calls into question whether our traditional methods of guessing ahead of time who will win an election are being erased by all the changes we are seeing in the world.

I knew George Gallup and was a founding trustee of the Gallup Institute. I didn’t know much about polling techniques or history but I was just one of a group of executives he would invite to conferences to pick their brain and share any new developments. Gallup and others of equal note were pretty good at guessing the outcome of an election and they got better when they kept polling, monthly or weekly, so readers could see trends.

Television and the internet changed the way people saw candidates. A news story could break and whatever they told the pollster who called the day before might not be what they would say today.

This brought about the advent of “exit polls.” These were really the brainstorm if news organizations like CBS, NBC, etc. They seemed to think that you and I could not wait until late in the night to know the actual results so they stood outside polling places and asked people how they voted, then they would extrapolate this small sample and tell you what was going to happen.

This caused all sorts of problems because the networks were announcing winners as a result of east coast exit polling before the west coast folks had even gone to vote because of the time difference. There was more than a little worry that some west coast voters just stayed home and had an extra dessert since the talking heads out East had already told them their vote wouldn’t matter.

Jumping forward a bit there were recent polls on the election in Great Britain with headlines that the Prime Minister was in BIG trouble, doubtless would lose the election and the entire nation would be embarking on new things.

Guess what. The Prime Minister won and he won BIG.

The campaigns of Barack Obama and Romney spent gazillions of dollars on polling. Given the current nature of polling I would say they should have saved their money.

Now comes the new presidential election season. There seems to be only one really strong democrat in the race but there are dozens of republicans. So the debates will begin, the news cycles will start, the spinning of what was said will get underway, and none of it will mean a thing because our world has changed.

There was a time when a man didn't even know he had been elected for three or four days until a rider on horseback could get to his home to let him know.

I for one place no value on polls in this day and age. We turn a knob on a television in our house and we know what happened that day, typically we are actually watching it happen in real time. I don’t need anyone to tell me what it means because all that is important is what it means to me.

And as the trite saying goes: the only poll that really matters occurs on election day. Are we so up tight we cannot wait, turn on the TV or the computer, and see the results.

I for one would like to see pollsters GALLUP off into the sunset.