Leading up to this election all we heard about was the polls, the polls, the polls.

Who was leading? Who wasn’t? It’s like we relied on them to give us a sense of peace and security in uncertain times.

But for the second election in a row, they turned out to not be as accurate as we’d hoped. So why should we rely on them at all?

Here Are Five Things You Need to Know About the Polls:

  1. It turns out asking people questions in the modern age is pretty difficult, especially in the cell-phone era. How many of us ignore unsolicited calls or even have land-lines? So it’s harder and harder to get a representative sample that is accurate. Harder still when a pandemic stops you from going door-to-door to ask people questions. So the participation rate has become much lower.
  2. Highly educated voters are thought to respond to polls more often, and those who believe journalists and pollsters can’t be trusted because of, say, the presidents’ remarks about them, might give deliberately different results to their actual preference.
  3. In 2016, some experts believe that the error in polling may have had something to do with the increased unwillingness of people to openly declare they were voting for a populist conservative candidate with polarizing views, preferring to keep it to themselves and the privacy of their own voting booth. 
  4. This election, Florida pollsters may have forgotten about Hispanic voters in Miami who it turns out, were very pro-President Trump. And when the turnout is high, models also often estimate a bump for the Democrats, which may have artificially pumped up this year’s numbers too.
  5. Our faith in polls might just be misplaced. They’re not designed to be predictive, but more of a snapshot of how people feel at a certain moment in time.

    However you feel about the polls the most important outcome we should all be striving for is not how numbers pull us apart but how they can bring us together. It’s clear our elections have become too polarised and now is the time to start building bridges with our neighbours and understanding their point of view because that’s the very spirit, the direct lineage, of what our founding fathers would expect us, their children, to do!