Pointless Polling

So, the results are in and Trump has duped the polls and taken a surprise victory in the American Presidential Election much to the shock of many people around the world. As scary as it may sound, he will be the next President of the United States.

Who knows how this presidency will pan out, we will have to see, but there is one burning question that remains: why are we so incapable of running a successful poll?

2016 has seen two significant upsets in the world of politics; first, Brexit, now Trump, both of which were given minimal chance of victory by the polls in the lead up to the result. In fact, in both cases UK citizens went to bed pretty much certain in the knowledge that they would wake up to a Clinton-leading, EU-remaining world, with no major qualms of the certainty of these two outcomes.  

So, what on earth are the poll-runners doing? If there hasn’t been a plethora of redundancies within polling companies since the Brexit fiasco, there surely must be now, they have been phenomenally wrong twice. The whole point of a poll is to give a realistic vision of the outcome of an election or vote, something that our recent polls have got catastrophically wrong in two immensely important cases. Who knows, if these polls had reflected the truth in the lead up to crunch-time and shown us the stark reality of which way voters were thinking, perhaps this may have swayed certain voters to vote the other way.

Does the way in which we run a poll needs to be completely reformed? Should we even poll at all? After all, you can never truly know what a voter will do when they find themselves in the polling station faced with a voting slip. Maybe a poll-less election would be refreshing.

All we know is polls are seemingly just a guess at the moment, and currently, the guessers really aren’t very good.