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Opinion Polls

Opinion Polls

Do you value opinion polls or do you think they are just another way to sway the masses through the media?

Polls Opinion

I am personally against opinion polls when it comes for election. First of all, it achieves nothing, except for satisfying people's hunger for gossip.

Also, it may affect people's vote in what's called "The bandwagon effect". If everyone is voting for *blank* than we'll vote for him as well. That may explain how the opinion polls are so often correct.

Opinion Polls History & Civil Business Politics

I would add that a lot of the opinion polls seem to be used to portray attitudes that aren't real, so that people will either think that they are in the minority or the majority on various issues. They are also used to get people to act, or not act, the way that the media source wants them to do.

For example, in 2000, some of the media called Florida for Gore, an hour before the polls closed in the panhandle region. This was based on "exit polls", which are no more than opinion polls asked of people as they leave the polls. Because of this, many people in northern Florida never voted, as they thought it was all over for their state. However, the exit polls were wrong by several percentage points.

I would have a lot of questions about exit polls. For example, did they represent the actual population of the state, or were they mainly taken in the large cities, disregarding the rural and suburban voters?

During this last campaign cycle, we had several instances where the opinion polls were shown to be heavily biased. The Los Angeles Times had a particularly repugnant case where they reported that, nationwide, Kerry had a significant lead over Bush. However, when various people started poking around in the details of the poll, they found that among the "likely voters" polled, there was a significantly higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans, and almost no independant or undecided voters. So, the results were badly skewed towards the Democratic candidate.

I don't really pay much attention to the polls. They are just too easy to manipulate.

Polls Opinion

How did pollsters get 2016 election so wrong?

Donald Trump's stunning victory dealt a crushing blow to the credibility of the nation's leading pollsters, calling into question their mathematical models, assumptions and survey methods. The results suggest pollsters may have wildly underestimated the number of hidden Trump voters - people who stampeded to the ballot box on Election Day but never showed up on the radar of surveyors. Ref. USAToday.