
The power of the polls
Back in the summer I wrote a piece titled “Why Voting Intention Polls Matter” largely about the Brown boost in the polls but making the point about the real importance of opinion polling in politics today.
It isn’t about predicting what the next election will be, because apart from those taken immediately before an election, polls can’t do that. They aren’t really important because they measure public opinion either – they can do so, you can tell if people’s gut instinct is in favour of inheritance tax or against environmental taxes or whatever, but it takes quite a lot of analysis to get anything concrete out of it. Most newspaper polls are written with a view of getting a good news story out of the results, rather than actually aiding understanding. You’d have to look at questions asked various different ways, in different polls, looking at issues from different angles, before you really got a good understanding of what the public think about an issue.
Polls are important because they set the political weather. They are the means by which we know if a party is doing well or badly, if a leader is on the up or on the down. In that sense, they have overwhelming power to set the agenda, to decide if interviewers begin an interview by asking why a party is doing so badly, to decide whether media reports talk about a party leader fighting back or enjoying a honeymoon, to determine whether a party’s policies are reported as something that might actually happen in the future, or just a doomed suggestion.
Gordon Brown would always have pondered the possiblity of a snap election, but the only thing that turned it into something that was actively considered, the only reason why some of the young Turks around him were pushing for an early election was that the polls told him Labour had a double figure lead. If there hadn’t been polls commissioned that week, or if they had shown only a narrow Labour lead, would an early election ever have become the likelihood it briefly seemed?
The only reason Gordon Brown eventually decided not to call an election, whatever he may say, is surely that opinion polls told him he might well lose it. Again, had there been no opinion polls that week, or had they showed Labour still with a double point lead, isn’t it likely that we’d be in the middle of an election campaign now?
And Menzies Campell, it seems clear that the reason he had to step down as Liberal Democrat leader is at least partially to do with the recent polls showing the party down at 11% or 12%. If the polls still showed them at 18%, or if there were no opinion polls to point out how low they had sunk, wouldn’t he still be there? That is the power of the polls.
Are the polls too important, too influential? What would the alternate be, people will always want to try and measure public opinion. Were polls banned tomorrow people would look at local council by-election results (and many already do), or Parliamentary by-elections, or silly voodoo polls on the telly or whatever. You would just get less accurate measurements of public opinion. And, at the end of the day, polls are but a way of measuring public opinion – the best way we have. What encouraged an election, cancelled an election and removed Ming Campbell was public opinion.