The problem with polling
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is the polling industry the real loser in the American presidential elections? Pollsters have come in for criticism that they misjudged President-elect Biden’s support, and did even worse in the state senate elections. Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University explains why some of the errors were made. Zeynep Tufekci, associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, argues that polling can have a distorting effect on democracy itself, changing how people vote or whether they do at all. Meanwhile, Anthony Wells of UK research firm YouGov explains how the polling industry functions outside of the electoral spotlight, and why political forecasts are just a small part of it.
(Image credit: Getty Creative.)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuel Salagossa. |
| 0:06.8 | Coming up, the problem with polling. |
| 0:09.4 | We should communicate clearly that, you know what, this is broken. |
| 0:14.4 | Like, if you want to read the horoscope, fine. |
| 0:17.1 | Treat it like that. |
| 0:18.2 | Why did pollsters get the U.S. elections so wrong? |
| 0:21.7 | And what does it mean for the future of the polling industry? |
| 0:25.3 | I don't think pollsters are going to go out of business. |
| 0:27.9 | And for most purposes, being off by two and a half percentage points, |
| 0:31.0 | it's pretty amazingly accurate, considering how low the response rate is. |
| 0:35.4 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:41.1 | I've long since stopped telling taxi drivers what I do, or I get the full gamut of all |
| 0:47.4 | their political views, possibly even after I've arrived at my destination. |
| 0:51.1 | That's Anthony Wells, Director of Political and Social Research at |
| 0:54.8 | UGov, a research and polling company in the UK. If he's a little shy about his day job, |
| 1:00.3 | it's because the polling industry has faced a pretty bad backlash in recent years. |
| 1:04.9 | They got the results of the UK's 2016 Brexit vote wrong, in polling they did in 2015. |
| 1:10.4 | They also got the 2016 elections wrong. |
| 1:13.0 | And now, pollsters mostly predicted an easy win for Joe Biden in this month's US presidential election. |
| 1:20.0 | As a headline in the Atlantic put it, a polling catastrophe. More on what might have gone wrong in the US vote and why that matters in just a moment. |
| 1:28.7 | First, though, how exactly do polls work? Back to Anthony. And I started by asking him, |
| 1:34.4 | has he felt the heat of the backlash? It went for a few years of people saying, |
... |
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