The US loves polls. In the first 26 days of this year, 186 political polls were released — most of them attracted some attention, some prompted hundreds of headlines, and it is only going to get worse.
By the time the nation prepares to elect its next president in November, the news is likely to be awash with numbers. As a result, some Americans might feel confident they know what the results are likely to be before they have even cast a vote. The question is, should people trust what these polls are telling them? My answer is a reluctant no.
It is not just because I was in the UK on election night last year when every single polling company had substantial amounts of egg on their faces. There are five reasons why we should be more distrustful of political polls than ever before.
Illustration: Yusha
One, the media are fallible.
People might have noticed this. When a new poll comes out — often a poll that was commissioned and published by a media company — it gets heavily publicized. In doing so, the media often increase the name recognition of whichever candidate is in the lead. As a result, that candidate becomes even more well-known and gets an extra boost the next time people are surveyed. US Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump was polling at 2 percent before he announced his candidacy. Immediately afterward — while the media was dedicating 20 percent to 30 percent of candidacy headlines to one candidate — his support jumped to 11 percent.
This is known as a feedback loop and is even more important in the early stages of the election cycle when the public is trying to spot someone they know from the throng of white men in similar suits with similar haircuts — does the public know there are more than 200 hopefuls vying for the Democratic nomination? Can the public name any of them whose surnames are not Clinton or Sanders?
Two, I am fallible.
Yes, journalists — even statistically literate journalists — can be dumb. It is the reason why just about everyone failed to predict Trump’s astronomical rise. That is not just because the methodology of polling is itself flawed — more on that to come — it is also because analysis is affected by the humans conducting it.
Personal experience and personal beliefs get in the way. Many of the journalists who dismissed Trump with projections that he had a mere 2 percent chance of winning simply did not know any potential Trump supporters in their personal lives — they did not get it. In addition, their personal beliefs also encouraged a bit of wishful thinking — they did not want to get it.
Until perfectly objective robots are used to conduct such polls, asking 100 percent neutral questions and communicating them to the reader with 100 percent neutrality, well, society has got a polling problem on its hands. Humans, flawed as they are, produce polls that are imperfectly designed, imperfectly conducted and — because of people like me — imperfectly analyzed.
Three, predicting the future is hard.
Polls are not a crystal ball, but, at best, a decent snapshot of now.
Even the wording of polls reflects a focus on the present rather than the future: “If the presidential election were today, for whom would you vote?”
Consider how different people’s present and future answers would be to questions such as: “If you had to eat your lunch now, what would you eat?” or “If you had to choose a romantic partner right now, who would you pick?”
It could be argued that food, romance and politics are not all that similar, but the answers all point to a basic and consistent truth about human preferences: things change.
This is why polls get more accurate as the future draws closer. Even then, there is no opinion poll quite so reliable as the results of what people have actually decided to say in the privacy of a voting booth on election day.
Four, it is hard to contact people.
In 2013, 41 percent of US households had a cellphone, but no landline, and that number is on the rise. This poses a problem for polling companies, because the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act means that they cannot just autodial cellphones. Not being able to autodial means that it is incredibly expensive and time-consuming for companies to poll those people. Even more problematic, this varies across the US — younger households and poorer ones are much less likely to have a landline. So pollsters need to take that into account when they are trying to take the pulse of the nation.
Five, most people do not want to be contacted.
Response rates — that is the percentage of people who answer a survey when asked — have plummeted. In the 1930s, it was more than 90 percent. In 2012, it was 9 percent and it has continued to decline since then. In addition, the US population has grown 2.5 times larger since the 1930s, so the overall participation rate — the percentage of the total population who complete a survey — has fallen even faster.
In the end, what is left is about 1,000 adults, at best, who are taken to be representative of the about 225 million eligible voters in the US.
All of this is well known to pollsters, who claim that their complex mathematical methods can correct for these shortcomings, but rarely have I seen the question asked: “What if a certain type of person answers polls?”
Whether they are cold calling or they have created a panel of individuals that they can repeatedly survey, polling companies all face the same basic issue of how to incentivize people to answer questions.
Some pollsters, such as Pew Research Center, pay respondents nothing, while others, such as YouGov, offer credits that can be slowly saved up toward gift vouchers. What if the sort of people who are willing to spend hours with little or no reward have something in common? What if they tend to be consistently more conservative? More liberal? Would that not skew all the poll results in a certain direction? I have seen no research on this point, but it certainly seems a potential flaw worth considering.
All of these things together mean that getting a random survey sample that is nationally representative is incredibly difficult. Gone are the days of flicking through a telephone book and calling the first number you land on.
These polling problems are not going away, they are only getting worse with time. Since the 2012 US presidential election, polls have failed to predict outcomes of the Israeli national election, Scottish referendum and the UK general election. In every case, their margin of error was not a few percentage points — it was way off the mark. Most of what I am saying here is not any kind of groundbreaking revelation. So why then do people continue to rely on polls?
In a world with so much uncertainty, there is an emotional comfort in the coldness of numbers. People are reassured when they are told what is likely to happen.
Pamela Meyer, chief executive of a deception detection company, often gives the same advice about how to spot a lie: “If you do not want to be deceived, you have to know what is it that you are hungry for.”
Journalists need to be more conscious of what they want the polls to tell them before they start reporting them, and readers should be cautious of any headline that confidently tells them what is likely to happen on Nov. 8 this year.
Since the end of the Cold War, the US-China espionage battle has arguably become the largest on Earth. Spying on China is vital for the US, as China’s growing military and technological capabilities pose direct challenges to its interests, especially in defending Taiwan and maintaining security in the Indo-Pacific. Intelligence gathering helps the US counter Chinese aggression, stay ahead of threats and safeguard not only its own security, but also the stability of global trade routes. Unchecked Chinese expansion could destabilize the region and have far-reaching global consequences. In recent years, spying on China has become increasingly difficult for the US
Lately, China has been inviting Taiwanese influencers to travel to China’s Xinjiang region to make films, weaving a “beautiful Xinjiang” narrative as an antidote to the international community’s criticisms by creating a Potemkin village where nothing is awry. Such manipulations appear harmless — even compelling enough for people to go there — but peeling back the shiny veneer reveals something more insidious, something that is hard to ignore. These films are not only meant to promote tourism, but also harbor a deeper level of political intentions. Xinjiang — a region of China continuously listed in global human rights reports —
The annual summit of East Asia and other events around the ASEAN summit in October and November every year have become the most important gathering of leaders in the Indo-Pacific region. This year, as Laos is the chair of ASEAN, it was privileged to host all of the ministerial and summit meetings associated with ASEAN. Besides the main summit, this included the high-profile East Asia Summit, ASEAN summits with its dialogue partners and the ASEAN Plus Three Summit with China, Japan and South Korea. The events and what happens around them have changed over the past 15 years from a US-supported, ASEAN-led
To the dismay of the Chinese propaganda machine, President William Lai (賴清德) has been mounting an information offensive through his speeches. No longer are Taiwanese content with passively reacting to China’s encroachment in the international window of discourse, but Taiwan is now setting the tone and pace of conversation. Last month, Lai’s statement that “If China wants Taiwan it should also take back land from Russia” made international headlines, pointing out the duplicity of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) revanchism. History shows that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) stance on regional territorial disputes has not been consistent. The early CCP
RSS