This is journalism? — @PatrickThornton

The pre-primary polls in New Hampshire predicted a Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton, victory.

They predicted a landslide, a race changing victory. Alas, Clinton won, despite Obama being ahead by double digits in many polls. The polls have been wrong twice now — even exit polls had Obama out front.

The real question is: why do journalists keep trumpeting these obviously flawed polls? If the polls cannot be remotely accurate (and they haven’t been) it’s our duty to not report them. Polls influence elections and democracy.

If these polls aren’t remotely correct, then they are perverting the democratic process. There are many theories as to why the polls were wrong, such as the “Bradley Effect.” The “Bradley Effect” is a theory that says people are more likely to tell a pollster they will vote for a black candidate than they actually would in order to seem more progressive.

Gary Langer goes over the New Hampshire polling mess as well:

There will be a serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire; that is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why.

But we need to know it through careful, empirically based analysis. There will be a lot of claims about what happened – about respondents who reputedly lied, about alleged difficulties polling in biracial contests. That may be so. It also may be a smokescreen – a convenient foil for pollsters who’d rather fault their respondents than own up to other possibilities – such as their own failings in sampling and likely voter modeling.

I’m not a pollster, and I don’t care why the polls we wrong. I’m a journalist. I just care that the polls were wrong.

Journalists have many ways to cover elections, and polls have always been one part of that coverage. If we cannot trust the veracity of polls then journalists should find something else to cover, like, say the issues. In the meantime, unless pollsters can figure out what is wrong with the polling numbers and how to fix the methodology, journalists should refuse to report on them.

I know this is tough in an era of journalism that is predicated on one thing — making money — but we owe it to our fellow Americans to report only the truth. We owe it to ourselves and our country to report the truth. And baseless polls are anything but the truth.

Otherwise we’re not producing journalism, and we’re not journalists.

P.S. I salute CNN for waiting until after AP and others called the race, because CNN didn’t feel comfortable calling it then. I’d rather them be late, and right, than earlier and wrong. Florida in 2000 anyone?

bored_at_work

I agree with you that the poll and election results were really far off–and that it’s troubling. However, we don’t know for sure that the difference in numbers had anything to do with polling practices or journalists. Perhaps a large number of people really did change their minds on the day of the primary. Perhaps something went awry during voting. Maybe some sort of voter fraud/corruption took place. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I hope the polling practices were sound. I’d like to think they were, considering how many different organizations did polling and how similar their results were. If they were in fact sound, the difference between the poll results and the election results generates something — a story. I’d like to see CNN or any of the other news organizations that released one of those way-off polls get up to New Hampshire and figure out where the difference came from. All we have now is speculation. If they did the story, we’d have fact (and real journalism). They should crunch some numbers–based on their polling and the election results–and disclose their polling practices in full and tell us why their numbers were so off. That would be responsible journalism.

As far as journalists refraining from doing polls because they can’t be right all or even most of the time, I don’t think there’s enough evidence to suggest that would be a good idea. Polls that don’t predict elections exactly as they will be are certainly not more detrimental than letting the system go totally unchecked. If polling practices in New Hampshire were sound, for instance, and something swayed that many votes that quickly, journalists should attempt a story about why the numbers were so off. They should follow through with it (number punching and all) to determine whether there was some sort of fraud, that is, if the numbers don’t add up.

P.S. I still wonder if such a great lead in the polls kept Obama supporters from the polls, since they thought he was a shoe-in. If that did happen and was enough to sway N.H. to vote Hillary, then polling could be deemed responsible for Hillary’s win. The knee-jerk reaction would be to say “Well polling doesn’t have a place in U.S. politics if it’s going to sway elections.” But, since when are journalists in the business of withholding information from the public?