Polls for the 2016 U.S. presidential race have been defying all expectations: Donald Trump as the persistent Republican frontrunner even as he insults large swaths of the country and brushes off policy questions; Hillary Clinton haunted by an email controversy Democrats shrug off while a Vermont socialist keeps gaining on her.
Are the polls correct? While that is hardly a new question, doubts are intensifying after a series of high-profile misfires around the world in the past year, notably in Greece, Israel and the UK. As politics and business lean increasingly on surveys and data, technological and social shifts are combining to challenge polls’ reliability in an entirely new way. Polling professionals have no solution; investors are wary.
"There isn’t a pollster out there who thinks about this seriously who isn’t a little bit uneasy," said Kirby Goidel, editor of the book "Political Polling in the Digital Age." Interviews with more than a dozen pollsters in the U.S. and around the world revealed similar anxiety.
Brad Schruder, a director of foreign exchange at Bank of Montreal, said what many in the investment world have been thinking: "It makes you wonder, how much weight should we attach to these polls?"
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http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-09-29/flaws-in-polling-data-exposed-as-u-s-campaign-season-heats-upLook, our boys spent big bucks on rigging those polls. We paid off the right people, and blackmailed the others. Now you are telling me that was a waste of time and we can't barrage the chumps with our made up stories?
I mean, let's get real here. We worked that Obama puppet since he was in college, and he's working out just fine. We got twenty years invested in JebHillary, in fact I'll let you in on a little secret. It's the same person, actually, underneath the Jeb and Hillary masks. He's a guy we picked off the street in San Francisco, we pay him with bottles of Sangria.
Damnation. All that work for nothing, you say? How are we supposed to run the world then?
