Why Does This Keep Happening?

Here in Australia there was a federal election last weekend. All the polls predicted a win for the Australian Labor Party (not a typo; they use the American spelling) over the incumbent Liberal-National government. In the event, the government won an unexpected victory and actually increased its tally of seats in the House of Representatives.

This was something of a shock as more than fifty separate polls over the past three years had predicted a Labor victory. Two Liberal-National prime ministers (Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull) lost their jobs because of poor polls. However, it has emerged that the pollsters were badly wrong. I would like to offer three exclamation which I call…

1/ the Nikita Khrushchev reason,

2/ the Homer Simpson reason and

3/ the Bad Santa reason.

Something of a pattern of ‘shock’ election results has emerged in the West over the past few years. In 2014, polls predicted a much narrower margin in the independence referendum than the 10%+ shellacking meted out to the racist SNP by the people of Scotland. In 2015, David Cameron led the Conservatives to their first majority in 23 years despite predictions of another hung parliament. The year 2016 saw the twin shocks of a vote for Leave in the UK and the election of the hilariously unqualified Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States over Establishment favourite Hillary Clinton.

So what is happening? Why are the polls so wrong, so often?

My first explanation can be called the Nikita Khrushchev reason. Khrushchev was a senior figure in Joseph Stalin’s government in the 1930s and 1940s and succeeded him as leader of the Soviet Union in 1953. In 1956, Khrushchev made a secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist party in which he denounced Stalin’s tyranny, cult of personality and distortions of Marxism-Leninism. When challenged as to why he had gone along with Stalin’s actions, Khrushchev asked who was questioning him. When no one would reply, he pointed out that he had not spoken out for the same reason – fear.

I am not for one moment comparing the modern West to Stalin’s Russia. What I am suggesting is that there is a reluctance – fear? – on the part of many people to voice their real concerns for fear of falling foul of the ruling class and their running dogs. Be honest, how many people can you name who have had their lives ruined or who have been subjected to hatred from Twitter mobs? People may well be reluctant to voice opinions not approved of by the Establishment, the media and the tiny but extremely loud Everything is Racist crowd. This could well distort the data pollsters receive in their surveys.

My second explanation is the Homer Simpson reason. In the episode Trash of the Titans, Homer got into a dispute with the dustmen in his street and ended up running for office as Sanitation Commissioner. His predictably inept campaign led Homer to complain to Moe the bartender…

“My campaign is a disaster, Moe. I hate the public so much. Why won’t they vote for me? Then I’d make them pay.” [My emphasis]

There is a real sense of hatred for ordinary people coming from some parts of the pseudo-left. It seems easier to denounce people as racist thickos than to explain why the public reject your ideas. This sort of disdain for the public came from upper-class Tories in my youth; now it seems to come mostly from people who claim to be ‘progressive.’ Perhaps people won’t tell the pollsters their real intentions because they don’t much care for being sneered at? Incidentally, who’s the thicko? The person who leaves school at 16, gets a trade and ends up with their own business employing two or three people? Or the person who spends £60,000 on a worthless degree from a fourth-rate ‘university’ and ends up flipping burgers in McDonald’s?

My third thought is the Bad Santa reason. Billy Bob Thornton was brilliant as the misanthropic drunk who got a job as a department store Santa in order to steal the store’s Christmas takings. Pollsters claim to be disinterested technocrats, but like Thornton’s character, they are clearly really bad at their jobs.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for technocracy in certain circumstances. I want the best doctor, solicitor or financial consultant possible. But politics is not a technical business and, given that it deals with the desires of fallible human beings, is not always susceptible to reason.

The European Union has always claimed to be a technocratic organisation. But since it’s inception in November 1993, the EU has faced three major crises – the Yugoslavian wars in the mid-1990s, the financial crash in 2008-9 and the ongoing refugee problems caused by the Syrian Civil War. In all these situations the EU either failed to solve the problem or made them much worse. If the EU is run by technocrats then I am the king of Norway. Donald Tusk, Guy Verhofstadt and the sobriety-challenged Jean-Claude Juncker are the sort of technocrats that make Donald Trump look like the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D Roosevelt rolled into one.

There you have it. The pollsters – and their masters in the wider ruling class – get it wrong because of their suppression of free speech and hatred for the public. But it’s the Bad Santa reason that is the key here – they are really, really bad at their jobs!