Poll Dancing

Dewey Defeats Truman"..oops

Opinion Polls were also famously wrong over Major and I wonder if they are any better now . There seems little reason to think so.Chris Morris in Brass Eye did a spoof vox pop when he asked for people’s opinions about "Soul Reversal" Despite the transparent gibberish of the question punters gaily opinined this way and that, some for , some against.

So that is one problem with Polls, it is exceedingly difficult to isolate doorstep opinion or indeed unravel conflicting views on , say , tax and services .People may be far more serious in the quiet confessional of the voting booth and Major’s triumph was a good proof of that.

The received wisdom is that you can blow of the froth and underneath its the economy stupid, I `m not so sure .The perception people have of the economy is a very different thing to the reality .Most people are little better off than ten years ago but the endless repetition of 'growth', and the memory of the preceding and utterly different periods prior to the late 80s still ensure relative calm is something small c Conservatives value. Niall Ferguson’s` Cash Nexus demolishes any easy linkage between good times and votes in reality.

Surely they use sophisticated methods now though you say...They do , but they can only look back to test them. Immigration stats are based on interviewing one man and his dog and asking ‘what he reckons’. They extrapolate with extreme sophistication from past trends ( it would hardly be future trends) and adjust on base figures . This is why they are hopeless at spotting accelerations and were badly out. For all their cunning Pollsters do not foresee the future, they adjust the past.

After Hilary Clinton’s come back we might recall when we discuss Polls endlessly for the next two years , that they are an act of faith for the political nerd right from the off, and may well mean very little . I expect President Dewey wished it were otherwise .