Chaos Report: Surveys vs Common sense
Do surveys even make sense anymore?
On the morning of Nov 8, 2016, US Elections, I woke in Foggy Bottom, Washington D.C., to the New York Times survey that indicated an 85% chance of Hillary Clinton winning the elections. Less than 12 hours later, Donald Trump had convincingly won the elections. Fast forward to 2024, right before the February elections in Pakistan, the Gallup-Pakistan survey presented Nawaz Sharif as the most popular leader in Punjab, way ahead of his rival Imran Khan. Only weeks later, Imran Khan won a landslide victory from a prison cell, while Nawaz Sharif lost even his own home seat despite the backing from the powerful military establishment. Similarly, in India just recently, every poll suggested a 400+ electoral landslide for the Modi-led BJP. As you can predict by now, the actual result was Modi securing less than 300 seats, relying on a coalition to form a government.
While ill intentions, poor methodologies, and using surveys as a tool of manipulation eat up most of the discourse around surveys going completely wrong, there is also another factor that has gone missing from the conversation. It is the fact that the public has also evolved because of decentralized technologies and access to information that wasn’t previously available.
Surveys were meant to fill the gap between an individual and the whole. But with decentralized technologies like social media that have created a new form of public consciousness, it has enabled the individual to be fully interconnected and cognizant of the entire community, all in real-time, rendering surveys and their manipulative powers as useless.
In simpler words, what I mean to suggest is that the public has become more sophisticated and smarter to be easily manipulated by traditional surveys that perhaps for generations were influencing public voting behavior.
Which is why more and more surveys are appearing to challenge common sense and the writing on the wall. It’s not that the surveys have changed, it’s because humans have evolved. The net result? The public is losing trust in information and centralized authorities, which is adding to the democratic erosion around the world, and especially in the United States.
With all the surveys now suddenly showing Kamala Harris leading over Trump across key states, one is again left wondering between surveys and common sense.