One of the most notable things about the municipal rise of the BNP is that it bears absolutely no resemblance to the opinion poll results loudly trumpeted by the Cameron-loving media.
Opinion polls long ago became little more than voting intention polls, and even before that all sorts of issues were systematically kept off the agenda by simply never asking about them, as is still very much the case.
Furthermore, they are now conducted almost entirely by telephone, so that the pollsters know whom they are polling, having carefully selected them in order to deliver the “right” results for the desired influencing of public opinion in general and of voting intentions in particular.
That, we must always remember, is the real purpose of opinion polls: not to measure public opinion, but to influence it. People must be, and are, made to fell that “no one” shares their unapproved concerns, and that “everyone” is going to vote the approved way.
The concerns and the prejudices alike that contribute to the BNP’s appeal are simply never raised by opinion pollsters. And their headline figures on voting intentions have been recalculated in order to discount those who say that they are not going to vote, overwhelmingly the people to whom the BNP sells itself on the doorstep.
That body of people is now never less than a third, and routinely forty per cent, the only thing about opinion poll results that any longer begins to translate into the real results of real elections, which are now characterised by enormous levels of abstention. Those levels are very significantly lower where there are BNP candidates.
When the BNP storms Strasbourg, will anyone finally demand that the real results of the polls be published unexpurgated, that the polls themselves be once again conducted (if they ever really were) in something approaching a fair way, and that issues not pre-approved by the Political Class and its media associates be included among the questions?
Don’t bet on it.
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I'm not sure you're quite right on this david.
ReplyDeleteDo you have any knowledge of how opinion polls work, or experience or qualifications in using statistics or quantitative analysis? Not from this post, unfortunately.
ReplyDeleteWhy not, Coth?
ReplyDelete"Do you have any knowledge of how opinion polls work"
Not very well, evidently. They no longer bear the slightest resemblance to election results.
So they are either rubbish at measuring public opinion or rubbish at influencing public opinion. Either way they are rubbish.
ReplyDeleteAnd how right you about how many people now think their only purpose to measure voting intentions. Even if that was true the enormous number of determined non-voters would be a big story. Should be, at least.
Taking those who are prepared to say both that they are going to vote at all and which way, there is no realistic chance of even one BNP MEP. Expect a lot of articles assuring us of that in the next couple of months.
ReplyDeleteBut does anyone seriously believe that the BNP is not going to get the one in ten votes cast (not the eligible vote, the votes cast) necessary for a seat in the South East? Or the one in nine necessary for a seat in London (where they have already taken an Assembly seat, entirely unpredicted by the opinion polls)? And so on.
After the local elections that included the GLA ones, the pollsters were all over the place with their crude projections as if they were actual total of actual votes. Can they really not tell the difference?
Lo and behold, they predicted a Cameron landslide, just as the media want. If you don't like Cameron (just as if you didn't like Blair), then you are odd, eccentric, insane.
It never occurred to them to mention that even their own crudely projected figures gave Cameron's Tories only about fifteen per cent of the votes that could be cast.
They didn't see Ukip coming last time but thought the "Pro-Euro Conservatives" would clean up the time before that.
ReplyDeleteJust like the BBC.
ReplyDeleteBy happy coincidence, I'm sure...
Hear, hear. The pro-Cameron activities of the media and the pollsters today are like the pro-Blair activities of the media and the pollsters in the 90s. They amount to ballot rigging.
ReplyDeleteWe may console ourselves that in the Cameron case, at least, this has still never translated into real votes, which, cast weekly in local by-elections and in larger numbers at local (and this year European) elections, never bear the SLIGHTEST resemblance to the opinion poll results.
ReplyDeleteYes, the Tories are doing quite well in some places. But there is no sign whatever of any coming Cameron landslide such as the polls would suggest. The same is true of parliamentary by-elections.
The reason why the polls' defenders on here cannot answer that is because they cannot see the problem. They are sincerely incapable of telling the difference between an opinion poll result and an election result. To them, the opinion poll result is the whole point, the end in itself.
And, of course, they decide what that result is to be, partly by deciding whom to poll, and party by deciding which result to publish, the real one or the one recalculated to exclude the disenfranchised.
Come on Coth, graun et al, why doesn't the BNP do anything like as well in opinion polls as in elections? Why don't the Tories do anything like as well in elections as in opinion polls? Why?
ReplyDelete"Come on Coth, graun et al, why doesn't the BNP do anything like as well in opinion polls as in elections? Why don't the Tories do anything like as well in elections as in opinion polls? Why?"
ReplyDeleteYou don't actually want an answer do you? You just want to confirm your prejudices. But the answer is that, where a poll is accurate and has a large enough sample size, they do. For instance, the national polls are in fact picking up a significant increase in BNP support.
The opinion polls nationally project the Tories on for a majority. But not for every seat. That's why they don't necessarily win council by elections in Middlesbrough, say. But that doesn't prove that polls are wrong - if you had the money and the sample size to do a poll in that ward, it would give you an accurate prediction of the result most of the time.
Also, David, your point on pollsters "decide what that result is to be, partly by deciding whom to poll" is factually incoorect, and very possible libellous as it affects their professional integrity.
ReplyDeleteWhat "professional integrity"?
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though, who dials the numbers, then? A monkey?
Middlesbrough? Where the Tories used to hold a seat until 1997 and would have to win it back in order to return to office? You don't know anything about anywhere outside London and the Home Counties. But we knew that anyway, of course.
"Seriously, though, who dials the numbers, then? A monkey?"
ReplyDeleteGood to see some serious engagement going on here. No - a robotic dialler randomly picks numbers. These are then standardised so as to form a representative picture of the Uk, or wherever (so it doesn't accidentally just poll pensioners for example, who are more likey to vote Tory)
And don't blame me if someone sues you for that last comment now. You're factually wrong, which is easily verifiable, and you have impugned someone's job.
And middlesbrough was purely an example. Let's say Bootle. Or a Labour councillor not winning in Esham. My point (which is obvious, and which you ignored) still stands.
Your only point was that you knew nothing about Middlesbrough, which I think that we could all have guessed anyway.
ReplyDeleteYour lot have been rumbled. People are increasingly refusing to be bullied into voting the approved way because they have been made to think that they are odd if they don't.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce an opinion poll result that then translates accurately into an election result.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't bet on it.
ReplyDeleteAh, life was so much easier for the likes of Graun in that happy interlude between the invention of the technology to rig polls and the popular revolt against being told what to think.
Let's hear Graun explain why whenever the polls are wrong they are wrong in the same way as the BBC. Both being right is one thing but both being wrong is the same way is another.
ReplyDelete"Let's hear Graun explain why whenever the polls are wrong they are wrong in the same way as the BBC"
ReplyDeleteEr, maybe because when the BBC makes predictions it does so on the basis of what the opinion polls suggest?
And why ever would that be?
ReplyDeleteYou seem to have a curious relationship with opinion polls. You seem to put a lot of value in them when they seem to confirm an opinion that you have.
ReplyDeleteYou put less value in them when they report findings different from your perceptions.
Which is exactly the same thing I do
I'm director of strategy for a polling organisation. I confirm that David is right and the polls are deliberately rigged in their methodology to produce the outcome the newspaper wants. I haven't just seen the papers proving this, I've written them.
ReplyDelete"You seem to put a lot of value in them when they seem to confirm an opinion that you have"
ReplyDeleteWhen?
"You seem to put a lot of value in them when they seem to confirm an opinion that you have"
ReplyDeleteWhen?
How about when Theos - a religious group, so not entirely impartial - produces an opinion poll showing the vast majority of people in this country have Christian faith?
I've never quoted that. But it simply confirms the census, and it certainly sounds like Britain, so I have no difficulty in believing it. Primarily, I reiteratem, because it simply confirsm the census.
ReplyDeleteTheos is no more or less "partial" than any other polling organisation. In America, they sensibly bill pollsters, who sensibly bill themselves, as Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, right-wing or left-wing. So they are, here as there.
No one has answered my main point, which is that poll results now bear no resemblance to election results, with the rise of the BNP as the most obvious case in point.
We need to have our own papers and news TV and stop buying that of those who are openly our enemies.
ReplyDeleteIf you have the necessary billions of pounds, then go for it.
ReplyDeleteOne reason it does not do better is the fact that in my constituency there was nobody listed for the BNP otherwise I would have voted for them
ReplyDelete