Voters are more predictable than they think
Apollster surveys a potential voter. She’s a 55-year-old rural mother and GP who drives a Mercedes and watches period dramas. But in a fit of pique after a day spent dealing with NHS budget cuts, she declares she’s backing Jeremy Corbyn. Until recently, the pollster would record one datapoint from all of this information: a Labour vote. You and I know better, though. In the cool light of polling day, the data points in the opposite direction. Our GP is very likely a Tory voter.
Pollsters are trying to get cleverer. Yesterday, Yougov released the results of an electoral model that drew a shocking conclusion: Labour could actually gain, rather than lose seats, next week.
Based on any gut feeling, this looks absurd. It hardly seems like a promising first step for a new approach to polling. The dramatic headline disguises an interesting shift, however. Rather than trusting what voters say, pollsters are starting to assess how they behave.
The Yougov model attempts to incorporate demographic and historic data to discover correlations. The sort of estimate it might make, for example, is that people under 25 who co-rent a London flat are half as likely to vote as rural home owners. What people say about their voting intention simply becomes another data point on top, and it’s often not a very reliable one.
Unfortunately, this first attempt is still heavily reliant on polling data and only has basic census demographic data. Marcus Roberts of Yougov forecasts that it will become “more and more powerful as time goes on”.
The path it’s heading down is well-worn by advertisers. The most advanced companies use sophisticated models full of all sorts of data about potential customers. Search for conveyancers and Google might well start displaying adverts for new furniture and DIY tools.
What pollsters are now realising is that voting is no different. They aren’t the first to realise it. Such methods are thought to have played a role in Russia’s propaganda-targeting activities during the US elections.
Russian spies, of course, don’t stop at data or privacy laws. But even just using readily available public information, campaigners and pollsters are becoming hugely more sophisticated.
What makes this possible is that people are predictable. We like to think we are rational, freethinking individuals making enlightened choices, but many of those choices are probably so highly correlated with other factors as to be foreseeable by an algorithm using enough data. Democracy might look spontaneous, but pollsters are now pursuing the depressing, alternative theory: in fact, it’s as predictable as your Amazon shopping basket.
Archaeologists have unearthed a splendid Roman bath house in Chichester. The spa complex was probably used by a well-to-do aristocrat of Roman Britain, they reckon, because it would have been so incredibly expensive to build.
At another frontier of the Roman Empire, in Israel last week, I was lucky enough to visit Masada, a dramatic hill fort overlooking the Dead Sea, with Guy Stiebel, the man leading a renewal of excavations on the site after a decade. The complex is famous in Israel for being the last stronghold of Judaean rebels and refugees resisting Roman rule. King Herod, unlike them, was an avowed Rome-ophile. Masada was a remote outpost, but one decked out with all sorts of Roman luxuries, including a bathhouse, gardens, a palace and, incredibly, a massive delivery of fine Italian wine in amphorae bearing a label that it was for “Herod, King of Judea”.
Amid all the remains of luxury, however, Dr Stiebel had more humble interests. Visitors shouldn’t just think about the soldiers and kings, he said, but all the practicalities and ordinary people living there. He wanted visitors to notice the remains of a bakery, in which were found little fragments bearing orders of breads for people who lived in the complex. Blankets and sandals, perhaps belonging to refugees, have been recovered among the rubble. He is busy at the moment uncovering the remains of a huge cistern, perhaps not glamorous, but rather important in a desert.
The Chichester bath house is no doubt testament to the huge wealth accumulated in Roman Britain. But it’s also testament to the whole supply chain around it: the masseuses, slaves, traders and artisans who made it run. Amid the pillars and statues will surely lie humbler, but no less vital, fragments of history.
Recently, a friend has been sending me winding, existential screeds about his life. Fortunately, Gmail, my email provider, now has a new service available, called “smart reply”, for such situations.
At the bottom of each message, next to the “reply” button, it has suggested three responses, which I can send by clicking on them. “I agree with you,” is the first. “I don’t know,” it suggests, second. And lastly, most appropriately, “What?”
This might be artificial, but it’s not quite intelligence. It has not yet mastered the art of the sympathetic but vague and suitably long reply. It might work well in response to short emails that require a simple “yes” or “what time?”, but even in those cases it is simply too creepy to use. So I’ve turned it off.