Were the Polls a Lie?

It has been a month since President-elect Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in a surprising win. The news cycle has perhaps moved on from the shock of his win, but people all across America still cope with the confusion that has arisen with his victory. Clinton should have won, they might say. Everyone I know said they were going to vote for her! Even Republicans thought she was going to win! Trump had too many gaffes and too few positive news pieces on him, and the polls had him behind Clinton nearly the entire race! Perhaps, though, it is the polls’ fault that Trump won.

The surveys, which organizations such as Real Clear Politics, Pew Research Center and many news sites offer viewers, rely very heavily on statistics. The data they present is always going to be false. This perspective is not a conspiracy, nor is it pessimistic. The science of getting information from people and putting it into graphs, you see, is tricky business. Mathematically speaking, the perfect sample group is the one untouched by researchers. Even if the sample group is randomly chosen, even if the survey is conducted numerous times with different people, the statistics will always be wrong because the researchers went searching for it in the first place. It is the way statistics work in an imperfect world. The difference is so negligible, though, that it hardly affects the results of a study. Unfortunately, news media pollsters do not always work under perfect conditions. Professional research polls can afford to randomize enormous test groups, but the surveys large media sites produce are a little bit biased. With a random sample, people may not answer the questions a surveyor gives them the way they are meant to be answered. A pollster, then, assigns those “neutral” people to one candidate or another, based on inferences from the conversation. A few of these people were given to Hillary. There are also people who publicly sided with a candidate but secretly voted for another. Most of these “stealth supporters” voted for Trump, which could have given Clinton a slight lead in the polls. Polls from different news sites do come up with different results, though. A poll conducted by ABC News in early September, for example, showed Clinton with a modest lead of two percentage points. An internet poll by the Los Angeles Times gave the Democratic candidate a lead of four percentage points. Polls even closer to the election had Trump up by two or three points. The polls conducted by the media, and not by research centers, are meant to only roughly reflect public opinion.

There is a rising concern among a growing number of people that the polls were never meant to even crudely reflect public opinion. Mainstream news sites were in collusion with certain candidates to get people to vote a certain way, they maintain. Their suspicions seemed to be confirmed with the Wikileaks release of several documents from the Clinton campaign. It seemed that Trump was indeed ahead in the polls in certain swing states, and that Hillary’s team had done its best to suppress public opinion by tweaking the polls to always be in her favor. It’s a wild story, and very likely to be fabricated, but if it is true, the statistics on American voters were never meant to reflect opinion at all. They were meant to shape it.

This is a sad problem in the United States. If the polls really are trying to get you to think a certain way, and even if they are not, it has dire consequences for the neutrality of the press and the confidence that Americans have in it. This is not so much a reflection on the accuracy of mainstream media, but a glimpse at the understandable wariness Americans have for their news. Less than one-third of Americans trust their news sources, including news studies. Distrust in the statistics, which, if done well, are nearly perfect reflections of public opinion, signifying a new era in America. The danger of not being able to trust news sources could become a real threat to national security and stability. Whether the news really is less reliable, or if it has become even more trustworthy, Americans are not willing to find out. If two in three Americans don’t believe what’s on their screens, this could affect the future of our country quite badly.