I promised no more politics posts and I’m going to keep it. I won’t write about moral questions (freedom is better/worse than equality) nor debated ways of getting it (affirmative action is an effective/wasteful way to give equal chance to minorities). But I will write about visible, value-neutral things that affect politics – because everything does, even video game character diversity.
Look at this opinion survey vs real results of the German election (found it on a Hungarian article, but sourced as “ZDF”)
In 2015 Sept the migrants arrived to Germany en mass and in 2016 New Year’s eve, there were mass abuse of women on the streets by migrants. These developments rightfully changed the views of voters, as evidenced by the changing party supports. Around 2016 May Germany stabilized and along with it the voter opinions.
Then – according to the surveys – things went crazy in 2017 Jan when nothing really happened in German politics and people swarmed to the self-identifying moderate-left-wing SPD, while self-identifying moderate-right CDU lost some voters and anti-immigration AFD lost half of their voters.
Then came the election in 2017 Sept and the results are exactly what was in the “stable” period of 2016 May-Dec, with the last weeks seeing rapid return to this value, undoing the 2017 Jan changes. There are two explanations:
- Despite nothing happening in Jan, lot of people changed their party preference, only to change their minds in Sept for – again – no reason.
- People never changed anything, they kept their old preference, just the pollsters lied to boost the morale of their favorites (the liberal left) and push their enemies (the anti-immigration party) into despair.
Somehow #2 looks more believable for me and I wouldn’t bother reading any polls anymore. They are not simply inaccurate, but purposefully altered for hostile reasons. The best way is to consider them worthless crap and ignore.
So their plan was to rig the polls to boost morale, only to have it be crushed again a few weeks before election? That makes little sense to me.
Besides, I don’t know where your site gets the data from, but the popular Bundeswahltrend (german) is made up of 7 independent organisations, and they all showed the same phenomenon. To manage to rig all of them would be an accomplishment indeed.
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The question of who can be trusted on which topics and to what extent is the most fundamental question of politology.
The polls can be trusted, but not with accurate election result prediction. They can be trusted as a gauge of general political activity among those, who the polls are in favour of. Whether this activity translates into actual election results is a question the polls can’t be relied on to answer.
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It’s not like the pollsters lied, they asked the “right” people in order to get “right” result.
In my country these polls are usually on 1k ppl sample – that’s hardly any representation of 10 mil ppl…
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This spike in SPD support is caused by the decision within SPD to replace S.Gabriel as party leader with M.Schulz, former president of the EU parliament. People thought there might be a shift in SPD politics, but soon realized it wouldn’t.
Anyways I agree with you that all this polling every week is useless, as most people obviously either have a fixed opinion regardless of current situation, or make up their mind in the voting booth.
Unfortunately a lot of people don’t even read party programs and even vote against their own interests for the sake of ‘protest’.
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@Anon: their plan didn’t work. They expected to “fake it until you make it”, so by the time the election comes, their lies will be truth, because AFD implodes (almost happened, see Petry quiting on election night, if she does it 2 weeks before, that would be serious damage) and because independents go to the winner. It seems in the age of social media, these things don’t work anymore. Also, placing 7 spies into 7 organizations isn’t that big deal.
@Maxim: that’s a nice way to say that polls are useless
@Anon: that’s a nice way to say that they rigged their plls
@Tassarion: replacing leader could electrify the base (getting voters from non-voters) or can gain votes from the “neighboring” party (Shultz is lefty, so Linke or Green voters can find him better than their old party). But can you say with a straight face that any AfD or CDU/CSU voter said “now that Shultz is here, I abandon Merkel/Petry for him?!”
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Actually until about 2-3weeks before the election day he was seen as the typical Brussels technocrat, so rather more to the center than left. I think around the time of the ‘debate’ with Merkel he found out that everyone just sees him as more of the same center politics, so out of nowhere he asked for more social equality, removal of US and Nato nukes from german soil and other left leaning topics. I’d say too little too late, his goal was gaining green/left voters, ‘non voters’ and even some from AfD. Because quite a lot of them voted for them because they felt left out/forgotten by mainstream politics for years, so he went for the social issues.
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@Gevlon
They are useless if you don’t have any questions regarding levels of general political activity. This is a rather specific and a somewhat situational question, which is seldom had outside of professional political analysis.
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I am not an expert of German politics but workers were a large part of Trump coalition and and vote either traditional left parties or far right in some other countries. It is also not that far fetched to believe that Schlutz can draw cosmopolitan centrists from CDU as a Brussels technocrat and lose them as a leftist.
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@Gevlon No, it’s not the CDU/CSU voters who changed. The big changes came from the undecided voters, who happened to lean towards CDU/CSU/AfD. Similar to the swing states in USA elections.
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@Jean-Mira: swing states swing because of 1-2% of votes, just the “winner takes it all” system gives the whole state to one candidate. Doubling votes like AfD “did” in the last 2 weeks is unmatched.
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Anyone who doubts public polls are rigged should remember the US election and Trump’s 1% win chance. Then go look at where each candidate held their rallies.
Trump was always on offense, while Hillary was always campaigning in supposedly safe blue states. Their internal polls showed the real picture,
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Sorry to disappoint you, but the polls were correct for a much longer time than only 2 weeks before the election.
SPD losses were predicted and only the inplementation of Martin Schulz for a short time delayed this effect. SPD’s problem was that they could not offer believable change in politices since they have been part of the government for too long.
CDU losses were predicted as indeed a lot of conservative voters were disappointed by Merkel’s lack of change towards asylum legislation.
Bündnis90/Die Grünen (ecologists/treehuggers) losses were predicted because they struggle internally which wing will have a say in politics. The “realos” are pragmatic and, I am over simplifying here, liberal leftists (but not too extreme) and “Fundis”, fundamentals which are, unfortunately, SJW at its worst, thought police and tyrannical. For the last 6 months, despite having very successful “realos” like Özdemir and Kretschmann, too many bullshit realo topics were discussed publicly, turning voters with common sense away en masse.
Substantial gains for FDP were foretold as well, and not only in the last 2 weeks, but for over half a year. FDP’s pinup boy Lindner put in a tremendous amount of work with over 200 public speeches in the last year trying to convince that liberal values still have a place in Deutschland.
Die Linke: extremist leftist dreamers, former east german dictator ship party, take everyone’s money away so that they can spent it “equally”…. In a country that has based its wealth on hard work, this does not sit well with anyone except those, who think it is ok to shoot people at the border traing to leave such a failed welffare state.
AfD: Well, predictions saw them between 12% and 13% for a long time. This very recently founded party was still struggling with the political direction ist will steer to. Primarily founded as a EURO critic party with tons of very good arguments why coutries should not get bailed out (which Merkel and Schäuble did), it soon became a melting pot for rightwing extremists and racist neonazis. While Frauke Petry fought against “too extremist” views, the extreme righ wing took over the party she had taken over from Lucke, the former founder of the AfD party. She tried to establish a conservative party as an alternative to the CDU, a bit more right, but she lost control over the AfD. Except for her husband, no other candidate has left the AfD. Speaking of an implosion of the AfD is a bit exaggerated.
Many polls predicted AfD’s tremendous success, because AfD marketed itself as an alternative to Berlin’s politics.
Germans are sick of Merkel’s inactivity, yet trust her to be “a good leader” (?) but the majority wnats a change in politics and a significant one. They want a coalition where opposing thoughts collide and intelligent arguments ensue…
You might want to check other polls as the results came as no surprise for the majority of the German people…
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