Mark Pack - Polling UnPacked: The History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls

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First published 2022

Copyright Mark Pack 2022

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN 9781789145687

Without data, youre just another person with an opinion.

W. EDWARDS DEMING, statistician

Polls are essential in a democracy which is sensitive to citizens sentiments, opinions and attitudes.

HAROLD MENDELSOHN, sociologist

The Gallup Poll has been described as a cross-section of public opinion, but I regard it as a very dangerous constitutional precedent, and one which may undermine the independence of the House of Commons.

1ST VISCOUNT STANSGATE, politician

Boys, I think were in trouble.

GEORGE GALLUP, pollster, as election results from the 1948 U.S. presidential election came in, showing the pollsters had the winner wrong

While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.

SHERLOCK HOLMES

T here is one lie many politicians cheerfully admit to. They tell the world they do not pay attention to polls, yet in private they pore over the details of polls, commission their own and fret about everyone elses.

Despite this coyness from politicians, paying attention to the polls is desirable. Just as it is natural for a meteorologist to look at todays weather, for the manager of a sporting team to look at the current state of the league table or for an author to consult the book sales charts (perhaps), it should be natural for a politician to look at the polls. Polls if done well tell you what is going on. They inform you what those outside your bubble think. They tell someone who is there to serve the public what the public says it wants. If, that is, you can tell the good poll from the bad, and separate the useful insight from the dodgy extrapolation.

That is where this book comes in. As well as explaining how polls work, and showing how they can be done right, it also looks at whenpolls go wrong. Do they go wrong so badly and so often that it is best to ignore them? (Spoiler: no, they dont.)

Before we delve into such questions, a little definition is in order. The book explains opinion polls: the systematic posing of a series of questions to a group of people with the answers adjusted to make them representative of a wider group. That wider group might be Tennessee, New South Wales or the United Kingdom. The point is to use the small group of people quizzed to measure that larger populations views.

More specifically, this book explains political opinion polling. That is, polls whose questions are primarily political: voting intentions, attitudes towards measures in the governments latest budget, approval ratings of politicians and so on. Much of the methodology of political and non-political polling is the same, so much of this book will also help you to understand polling in general. But there are specific twists to political polling which this book covers.

The word pollster itself was first used by Time magazine in 1939. In one of those beautiful coincidences which light up life, the term was conjured up for a story about how the most famous pollster of the day, George Gallup, was polled at home by the first-ever campaign pollster, Emil Hurja. Like the word, Gallups fame lived on, while Hurja descended into obscurity. This book tells the story of Gallup and Hurja, their predecessors, their successors and how to make sense of their work.

A political leader in a general election, apart from being chronically overworked and unable to study even the daily press very carefully, is like a warrior or a pilot operating in almost total fog... [and so] market research has a valuable role to play.

HAROLD WILSON, prime minister

P olitical polls are part of the basic rhythm of democratic politics. But it was not always that way, for political polls are a much more recent invention than democracy. Democracy dates back over two millennia, while political polling dates back only two centuries to one particular election in the United States of America.

The United States

The U.S. presidential election of 1824 was odd. Only one party contested it. Yet a contest it was, with four different candidates from that one party competing for the publics votes. Those votes, however, did not decide the election. Instead, with no candidate winning a majority in the electoral college, the decision went to the House of Representatives. The winner to emerge from there John Quincy Adams had led in neither the electoral college vote nor the popular vote.

Adamss victory was a watershed in the development of the U.S. party system. The Democratic-Republican Party (not to be confused with either the later Democratic Party or the later Republican Party) had been dominant, and at the previous election in 1820, its candidate, James Monroe, did not even face a significant opponent.

The party had given the power to pick its candidates for president to its congressional delegation. With little in the way of rivalry from other parties threatening the success of the candidates it picked, that meant the presidential election had, in effect, become a small, closed choice by its congressional delegation alone.

That transfer and concentration of power in the hands of a small caucus was by 1824 widely mocked as King Caucus, in reference to the sort of monarchical power that the founders of the USA had deliberately tried to avoid. As a result, in 1824 only a quarter of the congressional delegation chose to take part in selecting the partys official candidate for president. Moreover, three others from the party ran for president.

This shift of power away from elite decision-makers was enhanced by individual states increasingly moving to let the public vote in presidential elections. Previously, individual state legislatures had picked their states national electoral college members, and the electoral college then voted between candidates for president. But increasingly, states allowed public votes to determine the make-up of their electoral college members. In 1800 only 5 out of 16 states had such voting. By 1824 this had risen to 18 out of 24, and in 1836 South Carolina was the only holdout.

These three factors a proper, albeit confusing, contest with a real doubt over the outcome; the fracturing of the power of the Democratic-Republican Partys congressional delegation; and the increasing use of the popular vote to decide the outcome in individual states meant that there was more interest than usual in what the public (or, at least, the subset of men allowed to vote) thought about the candidates.