Surveys can put you top of the poll or down the dumps

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

If there are two clichés that must be trotted out by every aspiring politician, they are the revelation that a week is a long time in politics – unless it’s during the summer recess when it seems like a week can go on forever – and the second one is that the only poll that ever matters is the one on election day.

But the truth is that a week is the same length measured by anyone’s yardstick – and that somebody must love polls because we get them across the media all of the time.

There doesn’t even have to be an election on the horizon for papers in particular to commission one which invariably reveals that the main parties and their leaders have gone no more than two per cent in either direction from the last poll a month ago.

And yet, funnily enough, if they’re not supposed to matter, polls seem to engender extreme paranoia among politicians.

Perhaps it’s because they are the only profession whose career is dependent on the whim of the public at the drop of a hat.

And even during a period of maximum stability, the most they can look forward to is a five year stint before they have to go knocking on doors again to plead for their old job back.

So straws in the wind carry more significance when it is a selection of those people polled out of season who can ultimately determine your fate on election day – by common consensus the only poll that really matters.

That said, the Trump team in the US have a unique way of dealing with unfavourable polls – deluded as their idol, they simply tell you they’re not true.

Take Jay Garner, a retired sheriff who was waiting patiently for his hero outside a convention centre in Charlotte, North Carolina, recently when he was approached by the man from the London Times for his view on Trump’s poor showing in the latest polls.

“The polls are skewed,” he said. “I think it’s done by the liberal media and I think it’s all to confuse the Donald Trump supporters.

“I saw a secret poll yesterday and Trump was leading by like 65 per cent to 35 per cent. And I believe that poll more than I believe these other polls.”

So the actual polls are all wrong but the secret polls – presumably paid for Trump’s own team – are on the button…because they show exactly what the Republicans wanted them to.

Private pollsters like this are the equivalent of business consultants – once defined as people who are well paid to tell you the time with your own watch – because any set of questions can be tailored to produce the desired answers.

But before we dismiss Sheriff Garner and his ilk as nothing more than people looking at life through Trump-tinted glasses, he is not on his own when it comes to theories on pollsters skewing the polls.

A recent YouGov poll for The Times – and of course it’s ironic that it’s a poll about polls – found that one in four Americans questioned thought that surveys were doctored to help Hillary Clinton.

Read Dave’s column in full in this week’s Connacht Tribune.