Wednesday 17 May 2017

The polls are being rigged against the young and the working class


The polls are being rigged against young people and the working class.

Traditionally polling companies used to weight their polling figures by asking individual people how likely they are to vote and using that to weight their responses. Nowadays they're using a different method which discriminates against young people and working class people.

They've decided that the young and the working class are less likely to vote, so they assign less value to any responses from the young than from the old, and they assign less value to the responses from the working class to responses from the middle class.

The polling companies are creating the misleading impression that the Tories have an unassailable lead because their methodology is not even changing in light of the fact that hundreds of thousands of young people and working class voters are registering to vote and changing the electoral demographics.

It wouldn't matter if two million young people signed up to vote before the deadline, the polling companies would still keep relegating young people's responses to secondary importance, and still keep reporting huge Tory leads.

Rigging the polls so that they tend to show an unassailable Tory lead is likely to make young and working class people who want a better, fairer, more prosperous future feel despondent, and maybe not even bother to register.

But if you're young or working class and you don't bother to register to vote then you're letting these polling companies create a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

The columnist Peter Hitchens once wrote that "opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion, not a device for measuring it. Crack that,and it all makes sense". I can't say I agree with him all that often, but he was right there, and he was right back in 2014 when he said that Labour should promote the renationalisation of the UK rail network too (which is what they're now doing).

Pollsters are diminishing the value of young and working class views to create the impression that a better future is impossible.Then they'll pat themselves on the back for their success when their polls dissuade young and working class people from voting, resulting in the Tory landslide they were predicting.

The only way we can fight back and give these pollsters the kick in the teeth they deserve is by registering to vote, and going out to vote against the Tories on June 8th.

Make sure you are registered to vote here



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1 comment:

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