What are surveys for?

What are surveys for? | Daily Tribune

It’s that time again when political junkies put on hold their frenzied scouring for politically damaging tidbits and adopt the pose of the horse race handicapper. The horse race, of course, doesn’t mean a thundering race of thoroughbreds.

Instead, the horse race here is more about next year’s mid-term elections, which literally took off in the past few days as practiced thoroughbreds and deluded donkeys alike are straining their necks at the starting gate.

Handicapping the electoral horse race is about assessing the relative winning chances of candidates of the coming contest or, in other words, predicting who’ll be the likely winners in, for example, the Senate race.

Politically, nothing can further be said of the 2025 senatorial horse race, except for the obvious fact that, as framed by a news report, “it could a bitter proxy battle between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and (his) fiery predecessor Rodrigo Duterte.”

Catchy though that story may be politically, handicapping the Senate race mesmerizes political junkies no end.

This is for the particular reason that last week two major survey firms released the results on the senatorial preferences of Filipinos if the elections were held today.

Predictably, in our hopelessly personality-driven politics, fun-seeking political junkies jumped right into the swirling political pot and started preoccupying themselves by asking: “Who is up today? Who will win tomorrow? What do the soothsayers think?”

In proceeding to answer the questions, junkies of various stripes, from those professing reputed political acumen to those harboring sclerotic imaginations, ran riot.

Social media trolls, our habitual copy-pasters of centralized sound bites, also joined in the melee since they too had to squeeze out a living.

In general, however, the flood of news stories and commentaries can be characterized in what is known in political circles as either a horse race story or a non-horse race story.

A horse race story usually focuses on how a certain group of voters are angry at a candidate’s stand on an issue; while the non-horse race story simply describes a candidate’s stand.

In distinguishing the two types of stories, you watch which use the so-called weasel words, which are editorializing words or phrases aimed at creating a favorable impression of a candidate.

If a horse race story doesn’t work, dismissing outright the survey results as false is almost always resorted to, especially if a favored candidate is nowhere to be found in the surveys.

At any rate, political partisans bent on brainwashing always have news tricks, which should put us on our guard since, as data journalist G. Elliot Morris warns, “those who falsely claim to know people better than they do themselves or those who seek to abuse public opinion by artificially molding it in their favor and ignoring truer data” are always up to no good.

An accusation which now raises the sobering point that “journalists, political commentators and politicians have developed a poorly calibrated and shortsighted view of political polls.”

In short, many have gotten wrong what polls are for.

So much so that many now see surveys as only a tool for electoral handicapping when in fact most political polls are not election polls but issue polls.

Indeed, electoral polls are snapshots of how a political personality is currently faring with the electorate.

But, the same polls also gather people’s attitudes on political problems and policies, which is more important.

As such, if a political personality is making good in the surveys, it is precisely because he or she likely represents slices of public opinion on public service, on corruption, high prices, national pride, on China and on other issues.

So, by moving away from the idea of polls as predictors of elections we now are able to divine what the public currently believes are the country’s major issues.

Personality-based politics, therefore, is not all bad. It can be used to discuss issues.