Opinion Polls Are a Socially Acceptable Scam

It has long been my opinion that every single society, culture and country, however honest each may claim to be, is full of what can be charitably described as socially acceptable frauds and scams. These range from the blatantly obvious such as claiming that corporate HR departments exists to protect worker rights to the less obvious but more noxious ones such as believing that elected government will act in their best interests of their voters. I would go far as to say that it is possible to write an entire series of books about socially acceptable frauds and scams in any given society. Which brings us to the question- why most people tolerate these frauds and scams, most of the time? In my opinion, it comes down to such scams not having serious negative effects on the lives of most people, most of the time. But such can, and often do, come apart in a spectacular fashion.

Let us now focus on why political opinion polls are, and always have been, just another category of socially acceptable fraud/scam. In case any readers is wondering, the original motivation for writing this article came from seeing a ton of recent “polls” which claim that Kamala Harris is now beating Donald Trump in many so-called “swing states”. To be clear, I am not claiming that Trump is a great candidate or anything along those lines. Instead, I find it odd that a person who never won a single presidential primary in the 2020 season and had among the lowest victory margin for a Democrat candidate in the recent history of California- when she ran for various electoral offices is now seen as a compelling candidate. Let me remind those from outside California that the electoral system in that state is so rigged that even candidates with multiple child molestation accusations, history of extensive real estate fraud and obvious mental incapacitation have easily won major elections as long as they were running as Democrats.

With that out of the way, let us focus on the multitude of reasons behind my assertion that Opinion Polls are, and always have been, another socially acceptable fraud/ scam.

1] Here is a simple question with profound implications- what percentage of people will accurately answer any question, even a very trivial one, about their lifestyle. We are not talking about anything remotely controversial, just something mundane like how many times they ate at a fast food chain in the past two weeks or how many drinks they has in that same time-span. While estimates about the base level of error and deliberate lying vary widely and are partially dependent on the question being asked, it is fair to say that “misreporting” rates range between 10-40% and is one of the main reasons for majority of peer-reviewed observational studies about the effect of diet on incidence of various diseases to be meaningless. Even if we assume a low “misreporting” rate of 10-20%, it becomes obvious that any opinion poll will have a far higher margin of uncertainty than the difference it claims to measure.

While an honest and properly performed opinion poll might provide reasonably good information about which candidate is a running distant third in a multi-candidate race, it cannot provide a reliable answer to who will win a close two-candidate race. Note that this problem is systemic to the process of opinion polling and even combining a bunch of polls into a meta-analysis cannot fix the problem. Increasing the sample size for a single study will also not fix the underlying issue. To summarize, the level of uncertainty will almost always exceed the real difference between popularity of candidate in any close political race. And this systemic methodological issue precedes the many likely malign motivations of “professional” pollsters and those paying them to conduct these opinion polls. As you will see in the upcoming parts of this article, things get much worse.

2] One of the most popular excuses put forth by “professional” pollsters to explain their numerous public failures in past decade comes down to the suggestion that most people nowadays don’t answer cold phone calls made by pollsters. While this excuse might seem plausible, even a moderately detailed look at the situation says otherwise. While it is true that most people below a certain age don’t have landline phones or answer anonymous phone calls, there is nothing to suggest that results from properly run online polls would be any less reliable than those from landlines. In any case, pollsters can easily purchase all sorts of advertising and personal data (from google etc) about people who answer their polls and correlate it with their answers. In other words, the rapidly falling reliability of political opinion polls has nothing to do with people not answering cold calls or moving away from landline phones. Something else is clearly at play.

And this brings us to the first type of malign intention- deliberately believing your own BS- which is why I inserted a picture of Nate Silver above this paragraph. This famous “expert” who gained fame by predicting Obama’s second presidential victory in 2012 has had quite the streak of bad luck since then and publicly failed on multiple occasions. This has not stopped him, or his ex-colleagues, from making millions by running polling and analysis organization, writing in national newspapers and appearing on many cable TV channels. Nate, just like other western “elites”, has consistently failed upward. But why have Nate Silver and his profession failed so badly in the West over past decade? Well.. there is more than one reason for that, but let us start with the most obvious. Nate Silver, like most other western pollsters, inhabits a carefully curated social and economic bubble. The only time he ever interacts with someone outside this bubble is when he buys a cup of coffee or gets served food at a fancy restaurant.

Pollsters, such as Nate Silver, owe their livelihood to pretending to understand something which is not real. Political polling is a lot like astrology in that those who make their living from either have to pretend that it works hard enough for their customers to keep paying them. It is reminiscent of how “holy men” and “famous astrologers” in India gain favor with local politicians by telling them what they want to hear. Pollsters will never admit that their alleged profession is largely BS and when faced with open failure will try to find ever more convoluted explanations for that outcome. This is why, for example, Nate Silver will suddenly start talking about how opinion polls in certain states were poor even though his analysis from the day before assumed them to be good. To be clear, Nate Silver is just the most infamous offender and many others, including some of his ex-colleagues such as Harry Enten are even more pompous and obnoxious. I sincerely hope that polling “experts” such Nate Silver, Harry Enten etc will one day give up being pollsters and embrace the more honest scam of astrology.

3] The second category of malign intention concerns the real reason for running political opinion polls in any country- but especially in the West. By this point, readers might be wondering why political parties or similar institutions would keep investing money into something which is obviously a failure and scam. As it turns out, this is exactly why they keep paying for and promoting opinion polls and certain pollsters. These customers want to see and promote certain specific outcomes- for use as an advertisement to further their own gains. This is quite similar to how some toothpaste makers advertise that 4 out of 5 dentists recommend their brand or how cigarette makers in the 1950s used to claim that 3 out of 4 doctors recommend their brand. It is all about providing fake external validation. Another example of this phenomena can be seen at award ceremonies in the movie and music industries- which are really about giving reach other awards and promoting their industries rather than rewarding actual merit or competence. In other words- those who find such opinion polls (politicians, billionaires, institutions etc) are in on the scam.

But why have opinion polls started failing so badly in past 10-15 years? Why did they not fail so badly before then? Well.. to be honest, they did fail even back then but the lack of a viable alternative media or the internet at that time allowed those in power to memory-hole the failures. A further factor behind their recent famous failures (Brexit, 2016 and 2020 elections etc) has been the concurrent open failure of political parties and other institutions in the West after 2008. Prior to that, the general public mood in western countries was generally positive despite a trend of increasing political and institutional incompetence. Before 2008, things simply hadn’t reached the point where a significant minority would be motivated to question the established status quo and it was much easier to pretend that things would ultimately go back to “normal” and hence the population did not question the results of opinion polls. Today, it is no longer possible to conceal the heavy ideological bias, outright lies and general incompetence of political parties and institutions- and there is no going back. This is why opinion polls, which were always manufactured lies and BS, have much less effect on the public mood, behavior and voting patterns than in the past. This is also why Trump in 2016 and 2020 performed far better than almost every single poll predicted. Since then, the public has gotten even more skeptical and distrustful of opinion polls and political process in general- and this trend shows no sign of reversing itself.

What do you think? Comments?