Don’t trust opinion polls in deciding how to vote on Tuesday.
That’s the advice from political scientists and pollsters alike: The polls can be wrong.
“It’s a teaser, it’s titillating. We all like to try to predict the future, but polls don’t really matter,” said Bob McClure, the Chapple Family Professor of Citizenship and Democracy at Maxwell school of Syracuse University.
In New Hampshire, for example, public opinion polls wrongly registered a big lead in the Democratic primary for Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.
But the winner was Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.
Polls should be used for entertainment purposes, political scientist McClure warns, and not as a deciding factor for voters. Too many things can go wrong in the polling process, he said.
“Do voters do, with perfect consistency, what they tell pollsters they are going to do?” McClure asked. “No, they don’t. And that can be due to various reasons.”
Often, pollsters don’t take a random sample of voters, but rather those that they think are likely to vote, McClure said. But the main reason polls are often flawed, he said, is because people often change their minds when choosing a candidate. Pollsters, he said, also complete their results before the election, leaving room for error if something sways voters the night before.
It is a pollster’s job to gauge what type of person is a likely voter in the election, which is not always easy to do, McClure said.
“People pay less attention to primary elections than they do to a general election,” McClure said. “People will tell you they’ll go vote, but might not. So the hardest part of it really is trying to decide who is going to vote.”
Fritz Wenzel is the director of communications for Zogby International in Utica, a company that often conducts polls for media outlets. About 18 percent of voters make up their mind on the day of the election, Wenzel said, and they get overwhelming amounts of information.
“It’s kind of like trying to drink out of a fire hose,” Wenzel said. “There is so much information coming out at them, it causes voters to be undecided much deeper into the campaign.”
In New Hampshire, Zogby International completed its polls around 9 p.m. Monday before the primary elections on Tuesday, said Wenzel. The polls found Obama was ahead, he said. But then things changed overnight, possibly because of Clinton’s display of emotion at a campaign event. The moment was replayed repeatedly on the television newscasts and talk shows.
“There’s been a dramatic change in media and the news cycle,” Wenzel said. “There is no such thing as a cycle anymore, the news is always running. When Hillary teared up in a coffee shop, people heard almost immediately, causing the tide to turn.”
McClure, the Syracuse University political scientist, agreed that the recent problems with the polls might not be the fault of the pollsters. Polls, he said, are simply a snapshot of what is going on at any given time.
“You ask people what they are going to do in June, but they may change their minds by January or February. That makes them highly unreliable,” McClure said. “At their very best, polls tell you what people are thinking at that time, and not what they are going to do.”
(Larissa Padden is a graduate student in magazine-newspaper-online journalism.)
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