There is great encouragement to be found in the defeat of the pollsters. We are not robots. It is in our power to change our habits and our thinking
By far the best news that has emerged from this election is not connected with which candidate won or lost. Rather, it is the fact that most pollsters got it all wrong, and it is they who are the big losers. Either the pollsters were themselves not neutral, or their questions were skewed, or the respondents deliberately misled the questioners, or the pollsters were completely unprofessional. Or is it that a flesh-and-blood human being cannot be reduced to an algorithm?
The so-called scientific samplers claim that by asking one hundred very carefully chosen individuals, the behavior of ten thousand more can be predicted. But human beings are infinitely complex, not subject to sampling, scientific or otherwise. And this is the second presidential election in a row in which most pollsters stumbled badly.
What is the purpose of polling? Political leaders may require them so that they will know the wishes of the people they are supposedly leading (which suggests of course, that the followers are leading the leaders…). But why are we all fascinated by polls?
Perhaps it is because there is a natural human curiosity to know what will happen tomorrow. The future is always closed to us, and mankind has always attempted to see into the future. We want to retain our personal choices to behave as we see fit tomorrow, but we do want to know how others will behave tomorrow. (Technically, of course, pollsters are not predicting the future, only what people are thinking today. But the effect on the public is the same.)
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