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Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Mike Hosking: The accuracy of polls in election year


Once again, we have an interesting insight into polling.

Yesterday we told you about the poll results from TOP and their numbers in Ilam.

Ilam is a blue seat in Christchurch. It was held for years by Gerry Brownlee until the Covid upheaval three years ago when Sarah Pallett, who never thought in a million years she would win it, won it.

Raf Manji, who is TOP's leader, did what Gareth Morgan should have done previously and is standing in a local seat with the outside chance of winning it, thus avoiding the 5% threshold of MMP, which they were never going to get to.

The reality is, despite that, they aren't going to get to it this time. If I was giving advice, I would genuinely look at how they present themselves.

I watched an interview with Raf a week or so back and was bewildered by what he was saying as regards teal visas. At the end of the interview I could not work out who they were, what they stood for and who they would align to by way of a major party.

Yesterday, according to his Raf Manji's own party's polling, which to be fair polled a seriously larger number of punters than this morning's Taxpayers Union Curia poll, was behind the National candidate Hamish Campbell. But not by much.

And the Curia poll confirms it. Or does it?

That is the problem we are starting to see already this campaign - are the polls even slightly accurate? Has polling become too hard?

Are there too many people, allegedly, undecided?

In the Taxpayers' poll Manji, who was a close second in his own poll, is a distant third in this one, behind even the Labour candidate.

If you take out the undecided's he is an even more of a distant third.

In other words, who's poll do you believe?

The margin of so-called era is out the door, out the window and it’s a picture of two completely separate races.

As I say, I don’t think TOP have a chance, either in Ilam or at 5%. But what they wanted from their poll is the sense they were genuine contenders.

And that is the danger of polls - who do you believe? How much do they affect the narrative and are they actually accurate, or just a vehicle for spin?

Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.

2 comments:

Ray S said...

I didn't understand him either.
The bugger of it is that these smaller parties can stuff up an otherwise good election. Any vote for a party never likely to get over the threshold I believe is a wasted vote.
Even if they did, we dont want another Winston
..

Anonymous said...

i don't think polls are reliable as running this show needs a good knowledge of inferential statistics. many of the polls have no concept of 'random selection'. some use internet surveys where people participate because they are paid - it would not reflect your average polling crowd. they talk about correcting the demographics, but if you do that with a total sample size of 1000, the internal errors are too much to treat anything as a reliable indicator. there is also no record of how many people refuse to participate (not those who are undecided). i haven't see any of the agencies explaining how they correct these issues (maybe it is a trade secret).