Lievertising

Who’s Lying?
Pollsters and the political parties they work for love to use polls to persuade voters. These are the companies that create those polling numbers around election time that say 90% of people like this guy or that guy.

Who are they lying to?
The general voting public and really anyone that will listen to news outlets that use polls to explain some phenomenon.

How did they lie?
In this particular case, the pollsters themselves have blow the whistle on this one. It’s strange for a company to admit publicly that their polling numbers, don’t really mean anything.

“Pay attention if you want to but, frankly, they don’t really mean anything,” sums up Andre Turcotte, a pollster and communications professsor at Carleton University.

The problem is exacerbated by what Gregg calls an “unholy alliance” with the media. Reporters have “an inherent bias in creating news out of what is methodologically not news.” And pollsters have little interest in taming the media’s penchant for hype because they won’t get quoted repeatedly saying their data shows no statistically significant change.

“In fact, they do the exact opposite. They will give quotes, chapter and verse, and basically reverse and eat themselves the next week,” says Gregg.

“You just say, ‘Oh geez, the gender gap is gone’ (one week) and then, ‘Oops, sorry, it’s back (the next week).’ It’s unconscionable.”

Gregg, who rose to prominence as a Progressive Conservative party pollster, recalls the initial “giddy” feeling of being treated like a media celebrity. Now, he feels partly responsible for creating a bunch of “mini-Frankensteins.”

“You’ve got this situation where the polling profession has sort of fallen in love with the sound of its own voice and says things, quite frankly, that the discipline can not support.”

But it’s not all the pollsters’ fault. Turcotte says journalists used to be more knowledgeable about methodological limits and more cautious about reporting results. Now, they routinely misconstrue data and ignore margins of error.

The MOE, as it’s known in the biz, is usually relegated to the tag line at the end of a poll story, advising that the survey is considered accurate within plus or minus so many percentage points, 19 times in 20. It’s rarely explained what that really means.

Take a poll that suggests Tory support stands at 35 per cent, the Liberals at 30. If the MOE is, say, 2 percentage points, that means Tory support could be as high as 37 and the Liberals as low as 28, a nine point gap. Or the Tories could be as low as 33 and the Liberals as high as 32, a one point gap.

If support falls within those ranges the following week, it should be reported as no change — but rarely is. A two or three point change is more likely to be touted as one party surging or the other collapsing.

Worse, the media often trumpet shifts in provinces or other small sub-samples of the population, like urban women or educated males. But with MOEs of as much as 10 percentage points, seemingly huge 20-point fluctuations are actually statistically meaningless.

“I’ve seen pollsters comment one week, you know, ‘The Tories are dead in Quebec’ only to have this magical resurrection the week after and there’s a pressure to sort of explain that and you come up with saying, ‘You know, well, (Prime Minister Stephen Harper) made this statement or he wore this tie,”‘ says Mukerji.

“I think if you take a step back and look at the general trend, there hasn’t actually been all that much that’s changed, quite frankly, in the party standings.”

Read the article on CTV Montreal