The Indian pollster, in the light of his recent mixed record, has the worst of both worlds. Exit polls have had a poor showing this year.
The messenger, especially when she has to deliver bad news to the powers that be, is used to dodging bullets. The soothsayer, for many, is an indulgence in the small hope that there is an order to life, luck and its fluctuations. The Indian pollster, in the light of his recent mixed record, has the worst of both worlds. Exit polls have had a poor showing this year.
First, they got the largest vote in the world wrong — most of them predicted a clear victory for the BJP in the 2024 general election. Now, in the just-concluded assembly polls in which most pollsters predicted a comfortable win for the Congress in Haryana, the BJP’s win has once again led to sheepish justifications from those who were confidently analysing their own projections as though they were final results.
Gauging political opinion is not an exact science. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s guesswork. Robust sampling, the right questionnaires and the sort of training interviewers receive can all have a huge impact on the accuracy of a predictive tool. And sometimes, despite the best intentions of pollsters, the voter can defy the a priori categorisation of their franchise.
Even pollsters in the richest democracy in the world failed to predict Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. In fact, given that exit poll results in India are usually declared between 36 and 72 hours before election results, it begs the question: Why go through the exercise at all?
The mixed results of exit polls haven’t led to the exit of pollsters for a simple reason: They make for good TV. In election after election, “experts” treat the exit poll as a dress rehearsal for result day, analysing a tentative speculation as a final diagnosis, complete with prescriptions for the political players who ostensibly lost at the hustings. And the viewer laps it up — politics, after all, is as much a national pastime as cricket, and public memory is short. Come the next poll, be ready for the exit poll. Just remember it isn’t the result.
