COREY SHIREY
Columnist
This election cycle is comparable with many of the strangest elections in our nation’s history.
On one hand, you have a big-mouthed billionaire who admitted himself just the other day that he could commit murder and still have a huge national lead. On the other, the presumed “frontrunner” is being plagued by bad favorability numbers and even an FBI criminal investigation, while the polls in New Hampshire and now Iowa say that a Democratic Socialist is in the lead. With these candidates leading the pack, it begs the question, how accurate are the polls these days?
In recent election years, we have seen the polls, which traditionally are able to pinpoint the winner of elections, drift further and further away from predicting the actual results.
One major poll, and arguably the most accurate poll in the country, the Gallup poll, had successfully predicted the winner of every single presidential election since its creation in 1936 except two elections (1976 and 1948), even if the numbers were within their margin of error. The 2012 election was different from the other two they missed though. In 2012, not only did they pick Romney to win, but they were completely off by how much he lost by. Gallup predicted a 50 to 49 percent Romney win, but in actuality, America voted 51 percent to 47 percent for Obama.
In the 2012 Iowa caucus polls, most had Rick Santorum hovering right at 7.7 percent, in fifth below Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry. To the surprise of many, Santorum won.
Although these are just two examples of the inaccuracy of today’s polls, there are more examples of the polls being incorrect than there are of them actually being right, especially as time has passed and the country has moved into the digital age.
How are these polls so inaccurate? In the author’s opinion, it’s simple; the system of polling is extremely outdated. In many of the popular polls that you’ll see on the news that are often implied as having pinpoint accuracy, they are so flawed in how they get their percentages that anyone would be able to guess that they’d be inaccurate.
The CNN/ORC poll is just one of many polls implied by the media as 100 percent true and correct. But if you look deeper into it, you’ll notice something quite peculiar. When the pollsters asked the most important question of who the people would vote for president, you’ll notice that the age group of 18 to 49 year olds not included at all!
To put this into context, in 2012, this age group summed up to about 39 percent of the voting population, yet CNN and many other polling institutions flat out exclude this age group. I’d like to reiterate, this isn’t just a practice done only by CNN, in fact, most polling institutions practice this same, inaccurate habit of simply ignoring age groups that they didn’t see as important. When this huge amount of voters is simply ignored, how could these polls be anywhere near accurate?
Unfortunately the exclusion of age groups is not the only problem with these polls. Again, referring to the CNN poll, you’ll notice on the first page it describes how the people polled were actually polled. Since we already know that the 18 to 49 age group isn’t in this, let’s see how much more they can specify the people they poll. They admit that they poll roughly 400 people by cell phone and the other ~600 polled were by landline.
Let’s stop for a minute. Who has a landline anymore? Today, fewer than ever adults use landlines and completely depend on cell phones. Their poll now excludes all adults without landlines, yet contributes to over 60 percent of their polling data. Not only does this not make mathematical sense, this doesn’t make sense period.
If these polls were designed to predict the opinion of your elderly, senile aunt that lives in the middle of nowhere by herself, then they’d most likely be pretty accurate. Unfortunately for everyone else, this skewed, outdated system of polling doesn’t represent nearly everyone’s opinion; instead showing only the opinions of a select few.
So when you contemplate not voting this election cycle because the candidates supposedly winning are a fear-mongering billionaire, a socialist, and possibly a criminal, it’s important to remember, your senile aunt doesn’t represent 39 percent of the population. You do.