Polling is bigger than anomalies
Conflicting findings trouble a ‘beltway’ minority, writes Tracy Watkins.
Polls are to politicians what air is to life. They might protest that the only poll that counts is the election, they will tell you polls don’t decide policy, they may even try to convince us they pay no attention to the polls anyway. But don’t believe them. Depending on how flush they are, political parties poll regularly – in National and Labour’s case, on a rolling basis, though increasingly focus groups (mum and dad panels) are also a critical tool. But it’s the public polls that shake their world.
Polls decide the fate of a leader – Andrew Little stepped down when Labour’s polling sank to disastrous lows. United Future leader Peter Dunne retired from decades in politics after a poll in his Ohariu seat showed he could not win. And we knew the tide had fully turned against the Clark Government when the relatively untested National leader John Key overtook Helen Clark as preferred prime minister.
But polls serve an even more important function in politics – they tell Governments when they are getting ahead of public opinion.
Labour’s decision to dump the capital gains tax was only partly thanks to pushback from NZ First. It knew from its focus groups and polls that winning the argument would be tough.
The big public polls have a momentum of their own – they offer a snapshot of public opinion that can affect how news media cover issues, and even judge a leader’s performance. Without polls, we have only ‘‘likes’’ and ‘‘selfies’’ to tell us whether Judith Collins or Simon Bridges is winning in the popularity stakes – though social media is an increasingly potent weapon in gauging public opinion as well. And polls are expensive. There are now only two reliable big polls remaining, the One NewsColmar Brunton Poll, and Newshub’s Reid Research poll.
Of those, the One News poll is considered the gold standard, because of its consistency. Both have a strong record of picking election results, however. So when they came out with wildly different results on the same night last week, it rocked the politicians, and the world of political punditry.
It seemed to mirror a trend worldwide of failing polls, which – coming in the ‘‘fake news’’ era – has triggered a debate over their reliability. That’s a problem, because if the public lose confidence in the polls, the huge investment required in them becomes increasingly difficult to justify.
But TVNZ’s editor of newsgathering, Phil O’Sullivan, doubts we’ve reached that point.
‘‘There are a lot of people having a lot of reckons about what’s going on with the polls. But this [debate] is only happening because we ran both polls head to head.
‘‘It probably wouldn’t have happened if we had run our poll two weeks earlier or later than Newshub’s.’’
The two polls use different methodology – Colmar has a 50/50 split between landlines and mobile phones; Reid Research has an online component.
But probably the bigger factor in this case was that they were taken at different times – in Newshub’s case, the poll was done before the Budget, Colmar Brunton’s was after.
O’Sullivan thinks it’s unlikely the public are as vexed as the socalled ‘‘beltway’’.
‘‘Our audience doesn’t watch Newshub and there’s a very small percentage of the population on Twitter getting as antsy about this as people think they are.’’
Massey academic Malcolm Wright says polling is becoming more complex, in part because of our changing demographics. But if you took an average of the two latest polls it would probably be about right.
‘‘It’s a topic of the day but could all be forgotten next month. We had all this before the last election and [the big polls] were all bang-on virtually.’’
He is not convinced the public are ready to abandon polls just yet.
‘‘It might just actually be some loud voices at various ends of the political spectrum. I think the fact is there is still an appetite for more polls because people value them.’’
Professor Wright is married Labour MP Deborah Russell.
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