The truth, though, is rather more mundane. Good quality opinion polls are the best — indeed, the only — real datapoint for quantitatively estimating the outcome of an election before it has happened. They’re obviously not perfect, but they’re the best information we have. Whatever you may hear to the contrary, the political betting markets are mainly a measure of the consensus view of politically engaged middle-aged blokes, who in turn calibrate their hunch against… opinion polls.

There are clear incentives for pollsters to get it right — but they aren’t stated often enough. For most of these companies, the political work is a loss-leader, a kind of shop window for how accurate they are so they can make their real money selling brand trackers to McDonalds or whatever. They join in at election time to prove that their method works, that the numbers they give you about your business demonstrably correspond to what the population really thinks. As far as evil masterplans go, pushing an agenda by putting out dodgy election poll numbers is a terrible one — because unlike the pundits, who can couch their analysis in noncommittal theoreticals, you will be found out on election day.

I’ve been closely involved in pollster world for most of the past ten years and have developed a sort of broad brush heuristic for thinking about the polling evidence. First, only pay attention to the good quality pollsters — in most elections, there’s usually a surprising “random pollster that called it right last time” but more often than not they don’t pull off the same trick twice. Second, don’t bet the house on differences of one or two percentage points — presume that even the best pollsters will be a little bit wrong. Third, pay particular attention to the in-house pollster “MRP” models, of which the most robust is from YouGov (where I used to work).

Once you’ve got the big picture of what the data is saying, compare it with the media narrative. This, in betting terms, is where the “value” lies. Given that the polls won’t be exactly right, does the consensus seem overly invested in small poll differences, or insufficiently convinced by large ones? In the turbulent past five years of politics, there have been upsets in both of these directions.

Further reading

What's your vote really worth?

By Tom Chivers

In the UK, the General Election of 2015 was a gruesome event for most pollsters – most had it near-even between Ed Miliband’s Labour and David Cameron’s Tories, but Cameron went on to win an overall majority, thanks to the Labour collapse in Scotland and the Lib Dem collapse in England. It was, at the time, the most-polled election in history, and the media were furious they had given the numbers so much air-time and had missed the real story.

So when the Brexit referendum came around in May 2016, they were determined not to make the same mistake twice. Despite many polls showing a very close race, there was a deeply-held superstition, sustained by the betting markets, financial markets and media, that people would ‘see sense’ at the last moment and vote to Remain (as they had in the Scottish referendum in 2014). In the run up to the Brexit vote I wrote with frustration in The Times, the Guardian and Newsweek about this mysterious overconfidence, and how it wasn’t borne out by the data.

From the same author

Is Donald Trump toast?

By Freddie Sayers

The Trump victory over Hillary Clinton later that year was a strange combination of both effects. The polls were slightly wrong, and some of the state polls very wrong, but overall they showed a close race. Had we purely gone on the data, with the appropriate humility that with such a novel candidate attracting a novel electorate the polls would likely be additionally off, the possibility of a narrow Trump victory across the battleground states should not have seemed remote at all.

Donald Trump is not a novel candidate any more, he’s the President; and there’s certainly nothing novel about Joe Biden. It was a volatile campaign in 2016, with a high number of undecideds and high third party support; 2020 is none of these things. The main technical error in 2016 — higher turnout among demographic groups that don’t normally vote in such number — has now been corrected by most pollsters. The much-quoted ‘shy Trump’ phenomenon remains unproven, and when we spoke to Robert Cahaly, its main advocate, he couldn’t explain convincingly how it could be measured. For it to be a serious effect, you would have expected Trump in 2016 to have overperformed in Democratic areas where it was most shameful to support him, but that is not what happened. Plus, the midterm polls in 2018 were already demonstrably better.

Since the pollsters are collectively terrified of repeating the errors of last presidential cycle, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had over-compensated in their adjustments and we end up finding they have been over-estimating the Trump vote. Nobody wants to be the pollster predicting a massive Biden landslide right now: if there’s any “adjustment of the weights” going on it is more likely to be softening the Biden lead into safer single digits.

Further reading

Of course Trump can win

By Matthew Goodwin

One clear indication of this reverse effect would be if Texas goes blue. Joe Biden doesn’t need to win it, but the polls are tantalisingly close, though moving slightly in Trump’s favour in the final week. In Democrat circles the possibility of winning Texas is mentioned with a whisper, as if to speak it out loud will jinx the possibility. It feels unlikely, like it somehow can’t happen, but the data says it is possible. This would put Biden in historic landslide territory.

More broadly, Biden’s advantage in the polls on election day – a 7-9 point national lead, and apparently ahead in almost all of the battleground states — equates to a much more comfortable margin than Hillary Clinton had. Biden has roughly double the lead in the top battlegrounds, double the national lead and double the favourability advantage of Clinton in 2016. If the same degree of polling error that afflicted 2016 was applied here, Biden would still win comfortably.

All of this is why I believe it is reasonable to expect that Joe Biden will win the election by a comfortable margin, possibly a very big one. Put another way: if Donald Trump does pull off another surprise and wins re-election, fair and square, it would be an astonishing event. It would mean that the mechanism we have relied on for assessing public opinion for decades — a key part of the way governments decide on public policy, most recently on Covid-19 — is fundamentally broken. It would mean we have to rethink the basic epistemic foundation of our public conversation. It would be scintillating — so much so that I wouldn’t give a moment’s thought to those bets I placed on a big Biden victory. There’d be far more important things to worry about.

So what is the evidence about who is going to win in seven weeks’ time? Which way is the “herd” really facing? Currently the national polls show Biden ahead by 6-8 points; in the battleground states that will decide the election it’s closer, but he’s still solidly ahead. There’s a lot that can still happen, but in the coming weeks are the polls and media narrative more likely to be underplaying, or overplaying the chances of a Trump re-election? To find out, I spoke to some of the world’s leading experts — including one notable dissenting voice.

Watch the full interview below

Nate Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, perhaps the most famous polling website in the world; he faced a good deal of criticism after his 2016 eve-of-election model gave Hillary a 71.4% chance of winning the election (he’s keen to point out that this was lower than many other models — the New York Times had her at 85%, others at 99%). Right now, FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 24% chance of winning, and Biden is at 76%.

“It’s a weird election because it’s a little hard to diagnose exactly what the conventional wisdom is,” he tells me. “There’s a meme that everybody is overconfident on Biden, but in fact… people are quite cautious on Biden.”

“If you go to betting markets, they have Biden as only about a 55% favourite. To me that seems hard to justify, low on Biden. He is up by 9 points — he does have disadvantages like the electoral college but I don’t think that quite computes… When our model was released, everyone kind of nodded and said, ‘70% seems about right to me’ … So for better or worse, our forecast and the conventional wisdom are aligned.”

But not everyone in Washington sees it that way. Republicans tend to think that the conventional wisdom is, once again, under-rating the chances of a Trump victory. The pollster-of-choice for this view is Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar Group. He may be a contrarian voice, but he deserves to be taken seriously: he was one of the few in 2016 to correctly call the crucial Trump wins in Michigan and Pennsylvania. His polls show Trump narrowly ahead, and winning enough of the battleground states to secure a victory in November.

So how is it that his numbers differ so dramatically?

“We think what’s happening is what’s technically called the ‘social desirability bias’ — people give an answer to a question being asked by a live caller which is less about honesty and more about being judged positively by the person asking the question. So when there is a candidate who is polarising that it isn’t politically correct to say you’re for, you tend to give an answer that makes you look best.” He estimates this “shy Trump” effect is between 3-5% and he suspects it could be more, and that “live caller” polling is the method in which the effect is strongest.

Suggested reading

Why we aren't wearing masks in Sweden

By Freddie Sayers

It is not totally clear what methods Cahaly is using to assess the extent of the effect. He says it involves a combination of different polling methods (less reliance on live caller polls, more digital and robocalls) and asking additional questions such as “who do you think the majority of your neighbours are for?” to ascertain people’s true motivations. But the complexity of the method raises legitimate questions.

Another problem with this theory is that if such a “shy Trump” effect were a big factor, you would expect to see it most powerfully in districts that are overwhelmingly Democratic, and where being a Trump supporter was most shameful —  in highly Democratic parts of California, for example. Trump should have outperformed his polls there in 2016; but in fact the reverse happened. Clinton did even better than the polls suggested she would in those highly Democratic areas, and Trump outperformed in strongly pro-Trump areas.

In theory, those polling companies that do not use a live caller method should mitigate any “shy Trump” effect because you are not talking to a real person, but that’s not happening either. Doug Rivers is Chief Scientist at YouGov, an online-only pollster that makes use of its large panel of survey respondents:

“Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up to take surveys and we interview them repeatedly over time. What that enables us to see is the same people at different points in time and whether they’ve changed or not. What we’ve seen is about 7% of the Trump voters now say they will vote for Biden rather than Trump, and there’s only a 1% offsetting flow in the other direction. So that’s a big deal…

“We never had Hillary Clinton leading by more than 6 points in 2016. And we’ve had Biden at a high watermark of plus 11.” The YouGov model comes out with an estimate of 340 electoral college votes for Joe Biden (270 is the magic number needed to win).

This raises the opposite possibility that, in fact, the “herd mentality” in 2020 is underplaying the Biden advantage more than overplaying it. Pollsters and the media are so scarred from the 2016 shock that they seem to be doing everything they can to emphasise the ongoing chance of a Trump victory, and not blithely predict his defeat. Perhaps this effect is suppressing reporting of the Biden lead, and actually he’s even further ahead than is being reported?

Suggested reading

Stop crying foul over fascism

By Michael Tracey

Says Silver: “There was a recent outcome that a lot of people found traumatising for many reasons. You combine that with the fact that people tend to overweight recent outcomes and more salient outcomes — so just from first principles you would think that people might overweight the chance of Trump winning, just based on their emotional reaction. A lot of what they are doing is emotionally hedging.”

At the technical polling level, this could happen by pollsters anticipating another exceptionally high turnout among white working class voters — like the one we saw in 2016 — when they could well turn out in more conventional numbers this time round.

There’s also the matter of minority voters, as Nate Silver explains:

“There’s also a more subtle form of overcorrecting. You take every step to ensure that you’re counting the white, working class, non-college Trump voters, but you don’t take as many steps to ensure that you’re counting hispanic and black voters. There were some states like California and Arizona and Texas where Clinton beat her polls in 2016 — nobody cared because she lost the key states — but there were groups among which Clinton overperformed… We could wake up and say, oh actually, boy, turnout among blacks and latinos was really high, while polls thought it would be mediocre, and so Biden won by 11 points instead of 8.”

The “smart take” you hear most often about the forthcoming election is that Trump is once again being underrated — people somehow feel it in their bones, and the betting markets confirm that, showing a much closer race than the polls indicate. In a way, “you watch, Trump’ll be re-elected” has almost become the new conventional wisdom, and it’s more uncomfortable to predict a big Biden win.

As Nate Silver says, “If I were looking to play the markets and I didn’t have an ethical problem with doing it, I would think the price on Biden is very favourable.” Doug Rivers agrees: “I think the betting markets, which are showing this about 50/50, are underestimating the chances of a Biden win.”

So is Donald Trump toast? “Not quite,” Rivers replies, “but close – he’s browning rapidly.”

The actual polling is not online, for some reason, but it’s been covered in the press and the charity sent me their report. It finds that significant percentages of every age group, including 33% of 18- to 24-year-olds, agrees that feminism makes some men feel marginalised. More men (42%) than women agreed, but a quarter of women did too. The charity themselves described it as “staggering”, and linked it to far-right YouTubers.

You might find it surprising, given that – on gender equality, as with almost all measures of social attitudes – Britain has, for decades, been getting more liberal. The 2018 British Social Attitudes survey shows that, in 1984, 43% agreed and just 37% disagreed with the statement “a man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job is to look after the home and family”. By 2017, those numbers had changed to 8% and 72% respectively. Shifts towards more liberal, feminist attitudes are seen in all groups – older, younger, male, female. Sometimes men have more “feminist” attitudes than women: for instance, men are more likely than women to say that it is “always” or “usually” wrong for men to comment on women’s appearance in the street.

More from this author

Do men want sex more than women?

By Tom Chivers

You can see how far modern attitudes have come in a major 2016 survey by Survation for the Fawcett Society, which found that 83% of Britons support “equality of opportunity for women” – again, more among men (86%) than women (81%). There were more ‘don’t knows’ among women, which may explain the discrepancy.

A 2015 YouGov poll found very similar results: 81% of Britons polled thought that men and women should be treated “equally in every way” (including 75% of UKIP voters!)

Suggested reading

How toxic masculinity is tied to terrorism

By Joan Smith

So how does that fit with the idea that a third of the population thinks that feminism is making men feel demonised? Well: easily, I’d say. That Survation/Fawcett Society poll – which, remember, found that 83% of people support “equality of opportunity for women”, surely the key goal of feminism – found that just 7% of people “describe themselves” as feminist. The 2015 YouGov poll found a higher number, 31%, who would “consider” themselves a feminist, but it’s still a definite minority. Another YouGov one in 2018 found 26%.

If you ask people whether they think that there is probably or definitely still a need for feminism, the numbers are higher, according to YouGov – 53% in 2015, 49% in 2018 (it may look like it’s going down but I’d imagine it’s within the margin for error), compared to 30% and 31% who say there probably or definitely isn’t. But still, there’s a huge gap between the number of people who actively agree with the key aims of feminism and the number who’ll actually call themselves a feminist.

That suggests to me that “feminism”, the label, and “gender equality”, the ideal, have become separated in people’s minds. Might that be because there’s a debate over whether men can really be feminists? It took me all of five seconds to find a feminist magazine declaring that men can be allies but they cannot be feminists.

But while that may be part of the answer, it can’t really be the whole thing, because while more women are significantly more likely than men to call themselves feminist, it’s still very much a minority. According to the Fawcett Society, 9% of women called themselves feminist, compared to 4% of men. The YouGov polls found that 35% (2015) and 34% (2018) of women called themselves “feminist”, compared to 27% and 18% of men.

(I’m just going to stop here and note that the drop from 27% to 18% is large, and I am surprised by it, given the small changes elsewhere and the general positive trend; I still suspect polling artefact to some degree, but it may represent a real change among men.)

Suggested reading

The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

My own suspicion, for what it’s worth, is that while “gender equality” is an ideal that is easy to get behind, “feminism” is a label that is attached to specific, identifiable people. And, because any large group of people contains at least some who are stupid and/or unpleasant, some prominent people to whom the label “feminist” is regularly attached will be stupid and/or unpleasant. One hates to call out individuals in this situation, although I will link to this with no further comment.

More generally, even if you’re not mentally associating feminism with the most extreme or unpleasant people who call themselves feminists, you still associate it with individuals, with whom you may or may not want to identify. A comparable, though not exactly analogous, situation might be conservatism vs Conservatism, or environmentalism vs the Green Party. I imagine a large percentage of people might consider themselves both small-c conservative and environmental, but neither Conservative nor Green.

And from there, it’s a small step to understanding why a lot of people – who might agree with the stated aims of feminism, and think that feminism still has an important role to play – might agree that feminism makes some men feel “marginalised and demonised in society”. They might think that “gender equality” is a noble ideal with which they agree, but that specific people who describe themselves as feminist behave in ways that unfairly single out individuals or attack men as a group.

I don’t particularly think feminists as a group are significantly more prone than many others to doing that. The internet lets us group together and attack each other en masse far more easily. We can unite under a banner of video games, or trans rights, or Remain, or Jeremy Corbyn, and go in our great squads and tear pieces off some random internet person who said some disobliging thing about whatever it is we have written on our banner.

Suggested reading

On Twitter, I too become an arse

By Giles Fraser

It is, I think, part of a wider need to signal membership of a group: publicly denouncing someone for heresy is a clear signal that you are pure. I’ve heard some feminists complain that working for gender equality has been partly displaced by this call-out culture, policing public spaces for incorrect language or bad opinions, and that this puts people off feminism as a label. I can entirely believe that that’s the case, although I don’t imagine that it’s unique to feminism; I think it’s probably more common on the Left, but you definitely see it in, say, Trump voters and Brexiters.

In this framework it doesn’t seem all that surprising, or even controversial, that lots of people think that feminism marginalises and demonises some men. Of course, it doesn’t explain all of it – there definitely is an appreciable minority of the British population which consists of good old-fashioned sexists (both among men and women! Some 11% of women, compared to 13% of men, told Survation that gender equality has “gone too far”). And maybe MRA YouTubers are behind a real change. But I don’t think we need worry that we’re backsliding into the Fifties quite yet. Give it until Boris comes in at least.

view comments]]> https://stage.unherd.com/2019/07/whos-afraid-of-the-feminists/?edition=us?appcommentsnew https://stage.unherd.com/2019/07/whos-afraid-of-the-feminists/?edition=us/feed/ 20957