Wide Off The Mark

Consider this. After almost half of the ballots polled in the Presidential Election in Pennsylvania were counted and President Obama had already posted an eight per cent lead, CNN came up with a revelation. “The Swing State of Pennsylvania looks leaning towards the incumbent,” called the serious looking pollster. Seriously? Pennsylvania, a Swing state?  And what is this “leaning towards”? In a two-party game like US Presidential Elections, if you prefer to call an eight point lead “leaning towards”; it is not caution, it is plain stupidity.

In fact the run up to this year’s election in the US has thrown up some very interesting gems from the mainstream US media and quite a few of them need a closer look. In the older days, even when the loyalties in media towards a particular ideology, if not a particular political party, were as well defined as today, there was at least a sense of balance. May be for appearances purposes only, the TV channels as well as the newspapers never overestimated the exit polls and surveys. In fact, for a good part of  the 80s till the end of the 90s, you could be sure that the pre-polls survey that you saw would be in tune with the actual mood in the country. But at the turn of the century, something changed, and for the worse.

It was the time when political pundits realised the role of visual media in agenda setting and decided to shift their focus from the newspapers towards television. In fact, this process of change had its roots in the very culture of televised live presidential debates. Somewhere in the mid 80s, it started to become obvious that the surveys conducted just after these debates often reflected the performance of a particular candidate in the debate. The impact kept growing and when in 1992, father Bush’s one single gesture, looking towards his watch and appearing to be bored during his debate with Bill Clinton turned the election against him; the pundits realised that media strategy needed to be overhauled. In less than a decade, it was firmly in place. Bipartisanship went up for a toss and it never registered on the average viewers that they had entered in an era where accuracy and responsibility were virtues that were no longer fancy.

Let us talk about this year’s presidential elections. First, take a look at the openly partisan groups, their line of argument, their opinion polls and surveys and the actual results.  On the right of the centre line, you can keep entities like Fox News, Rasmussen Reports, The Washington Post and The New York Post. On the left you had usual suspects such as CBS, ABC, NBC and New York Times.

Let us start with the outlets with known liberal bias. Towards the run-up to the elections, networks like CBS, NBC and ABC kept a uniform line of narrative that although President Obama did not achieve “some” of his targets, he was much better than any Republican in the office. This line of argument did hold water among the known Democrat supporters but the sense of disillusionment was huge among a section of independent voters who were really independent. For the most part of the summer till late autumn, the polls conducted by these organisations were predicting an easy win for the incumbent. It was only after the Denver debate debacle that they agreed to show that the race was tight.

However, in the light of the final result, these left to the centre outlets were not widely off the mark. While the NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist College poll incorrectly predicted that Obama would win North Carolina, the CBS/Quinnipiac University poll incorrectly showed Obama losing Colorado. However, all of them were near close to the mark when it came to national votes and Electoral College votes, though here too, their predictions cannot be termed accurate.

As far as the agenda setting part was concerned, all of these networks were openly toeing the Democrat line on issues such as abortion, same sex marriage, euthanasia and big government. In the final weeks of the election, when the Obama campaign’s misleading advertisement about Romney transferring tractor manufacturing jobs to China started appearing on channels, none of them cared to point out the outright lies. But that was not surprising.

The situation on the other side of the divide, to put it mildly, was comical. And considering the conservative base in the US and considering the people who form commentators as well as the audience for these networks, this too was not unusual. For the good part of summer till mid-September, Fox News and Rasmussen Reports were giving the incumbent a comfortable victory. But if you look at it closely, it was more by default than by intent. There was not even the slightest spike in Romney’s popularity and it would had been outright comical on the part of these outlets to show Romney leading when none of the other polls picked any positive traction on his part.

But it all changed after the Denver debate. There was a visible positive bump towards the challenger and it was picked by everyone. That opened the window for Fox and Rasmussen Reports and they started showing Romney as  a clear favourite in as many as six of the nine key battleground states. They also received some sort of legitimacy when Gallup also came  up with similar numbers.

On the agenda setting front, of course there could had been no surprise. It is Fox, damn it. However, they did come up with some new ideas this time around that caught liberal commentators and pollsters by surprise. The conservative commentators started floating the theory that liberal outlets are oversampling the Democrat voters in the opinion polls and therefore the positive bump towards Obama was misleading. The theory was a no-brainer. However it did provoke several pundits and pollsters to come up with lengthy explanations that made little sense to an average viewer and of course no sense to Fox audiences who, by now, had as much belief in the theory as they had disbelief in the theory of evolution.

On top of it, this stupid rumour of a theory managed to do its work. Suddenly the liberal and bipartisan pollsters became very self-conscious and careful. Some even started questioning Obama’s chances in Pennsylvania. Especially CNN. In fact, they became so cautious that after their own poll following the third presidential debate showed Obama winning it by eight points, and that too when the CNN guys admitted that those calling on their network numbers were overwhelmingly Republican, they declared the debate as “too close to call”. Many thought, they got to be kidding.

Now that the results are in it is easy to see where all of them went wrong.

Fox-Rasmussen Reports poll also had Romney winning the national vote by one point. It missed on six of its nine swing-state polls. Rasmussen is an automated poll, which means it cannot call mobile phones and relies instead on an online polling tool to reach those without landlines. This opens a window for oversampling in the favour of a political party. And that is what happened. Rasmussen Reports had Obama winning Nevada and New Hampshire, tying Romney in Ohio and Wisconsin, and losing in the other five, including North Carolina. As one can see, that was off the mark by a mile if not more, from the final results.

Among other national polls, Pew Research Center and ABC News/Washington Post had Obama leading by three points, while the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey put him on top by one point. Clearly, liberal media outlets were closer to the mark.

The typical Republican supporter became so delusional that even on the day of actual counting, when other networks were confidently predicting Ohio to go Obama’s way, they were simply not ready to accept. A source close to this reporter narrated an incident at the Republican electoral headquarters in Boston where angry supporters forced organisers to change the coverage from CNN to Fox News because the delusional Karl Rove was still awarding Ohio and Florida to Romney there. How helpful this systematic and planned dumbing-down of American citizens is for the US future is self explanatory.

And look who predicted it spot on. An independent pollster Nate Silver, the statistician behind the popular FiveThirtyEight blog, who predicted spot on results in 49 states out of 50 in the previous election, had all 50 of them right this time around. This was the same pollster who was facing continuous ire and abuse from conservative pollsters, experts, journalists and voters all these months. And guess what, he was accurate even on the national poll figures.

Media in the US must understand that with mavericks like him available and easily accessible to the voters, the role of mainstream media will diminish. Unless of course they decide to throw away partisanship and over-caution to go back to the days of the 80s and 90s.