POLLING INDUSTRY: “HOPELESSLY OBSOLETE” By Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. (author of Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between […]
Don’t Believe Surveys – Trump May Have Lead
Political August 11, 2016, 0 Comment 333
POLLING INDUSTRY: “HOPELESSLY OBSOLETE”
By
Paul L. Williams, Ph.D.
(author of Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia)
Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by 6 to 12 points in the presidential election???
Don’t believe it.
The polling numbers which captured national headlines are obsolete, slanted and hopelessly inaccurate.
“The science of public surveying is in something of a crisis right now, says Geoffrey Skelley, political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
What caused the crisis?
The polls, even the best, gather information by arcane means.
The Pew Research Center, arguably the gold standard of the polling industry, persists in gathering information from individuals with telephone landlines, while neglecting to survey the rising number of people who communicate solely by cell phones.
“It’s a different world now,” says Roger Tourangeau, vice president of the research firm Westat, while addressing the obsolescence of today’s polling methods.
Relying on landlines, calls from pollsters remain unanswered by the vast majority of present day America. The calls appear in caller identification systems as 800 numbers from unknown sources. For this reason, they are dismissed as unwanted calls from telecommunication solicitors.
“People are leading more active lives,” says Michael Traugott, a political science professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in polling and opinion surveys, “and they’re harder to locate.”
This opinion is echoed by Celinda Lake, political consultant and president of Lake Research Planners. Ms. Lake says that polling has witnessed “a kind of steady decline” in reliability. “It’s harder to reach people,” she admits. “It’s harder to get them to cooperate.”
The problem is compounded by a federal law which was drafted to protect consumers from aggressive debt collectors and contribution seekers. The law forbids survey companies from using automated calls to gather results, even if the data collecting concerns important issues like presidential elections.
The inaccuracy of present-day polling became apparent in 2012 when a Gallup poll showed that Mitt Romney would win the presidential election by a narrow margin. In reality, President Barack Obama blindsided the Republican candidate winning a second term by five points.
In 2014, a national poll showed then-Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell losing his seat to Alison Lundergan Grimes by a wide majority. McConnell won by a landslide.
In 2016, Bernie Sanders was predicted by pollsters to deliver a crushing defeat to Hillary Clinton in California.
There are other problems. Unscrupulous polls taken by major news outlets skew the results by a myriad of means. One means is targeting neighborhoods which historically favor one party over another in order to obtain the desired finding. In other instances, telemarketers, who work for the polling industry, pad their daily reports often in accordance with the wishes of their employers.
Such rigging is nothing new.
It dates back to 1913, when the Tavistock Institute “created” public opinion through fake polling data in order to promote Britain’s entry into World War I.
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