CHAMISA TAKES CAMPAIGN TO OPINION POLLS. “ CHAMISA SAID TO BE SURGING AHEAD IN POLLS” | WHAT A JOKE?
By Dr Masimba Mavaza | A survey conducted for The Brenthurst Foundation by the partisan but the so called non-partisan London-based SABI Strategy Group says Zimbabwe’s opposition leader
Nelson Chamisa is surging ahead of his rival President Emmerson Mnangagwa
– 53% to 40% -among those who say they will definitely vote in August. The survey did not tell us how many people were interviewed but we assume that they have interviewed fifty people.
An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a survey or a poll (although strictly a poll is an actual election) is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence intervals. A person who conducts polls is referred to as a pollster.
It is expected that In the months leading up to the general election, polls across the country will usually make outrageous predictions. The little known Sabi Strategy group
predicted an easy sweep for the CCC nominee NELSON CHAMISA. From Harare to Bulawayo everyone knows what will happen. Media outlets and pollsters will be licking their wounds for failing to project a victory for ZANU PF.
This time, prognosticators make assurances that the opposition his winning basing on a survey of few people. But as votes will be tabulated in July 2023 nervous viewers and pollsters will begin to experience a sense of déjà vu. Once again, more ballots will be ticking toward President Mnangagwa than the polls had projected. Though the voter surveys ultimately point in the wrong direction for their own benefits.
In the past decade we have witnessed the failure of traditional polls in predicting presidential election outcomes across the world. To understand the reasons behind these failures we analyze the raw data of a trusted pollster which failed to predict, along with the rest of the pollsters, the 2018 presidential election in Zimbabwe. Analysis of the raw and re-weighted data from longitudinal surveys performed before and after the elections reveals clear biases related to mis-representation of the population and, most importantly, to social-desirability biases, i.e., the tendency of respondents to hide their intention to vote for controversial candidates.
The reasons for the failure of pollsters to predict elections are believed to be many [2, 6]. Firstly, the percentage of responses to traditionally conducted surveys has decreased and it is becoming increasingly difficult to get people’s opinion. Response rates in telephone polls with live interviewers continue to decline, and it has reached a 6% lower limit recently [7]. Response rates could be even lower for other methodologies, like internet polling or interactive voice response. Compounded with declining response rates is the concomitant problem of mis-representation of the survey samples. That is, the sample surveyed by pollsters does not represent the demographic distributions of the general population. This problem is ameliorated by re-weighting the surveys sample according to the general demographics of the population in a process called sample-balancing or raking These problems have led to some commentators to argue that “polling is irrevocably broken,” that pollsters should be ignored, or that “the polling industry is a wreck, and should be blown up.”
Zimbabwe’s elections are not predicted by a pollster who relies on the partisan media.
The prediction on Zimbabwean elections is a very elaborated rigging way by the opposition. This is where they try to condition the people’s mingled into believing that CHAMISA will win elections. This is done in such a way that a narrative of a victorious opposition is spread so as to make it easy to refuse to accept the results. This is trick employed by the opposition to hammer support in a dedicated war against peace in Zimbabwe.
Opinion polls help politicians understand what the public wants, and the public understand who is popular at the ballot box. But it is very clear that predictions of the 2023 General Election are widely off the mark. Zimbabweans have began to question their use.
In the lead up to an election, political pundits and interested members of the public will never refer to opinion polls to see how results might land, this because the polls are biased towards the West opinion and will never serve the interest of the Zimbabweans.
But while polls have been viewed as a reliable guide, recent failures in the predictions of General Elections worldwide have been viewed as being potentially damaging for the industry.
Opinion polls,are a survey of public opinion from a particular sample group, and as such can be useful in informing politicians about the views of specific groups of people. In practice, pollsters need to balance the cost of polling a large sample against the reduction in sampling error, and so a typical compromise for political pollsters is to use a sample size of 1,000-10,000 respondents. The polls relied upon by the Sabi Strategy came from a sample of fifty to hundred who were all CCC members. The result of the poll can not be relied on as it is biased and time wasting.
Polls survey a variety of issues relating to voters’ views on, from specific policies to political leaders’ approval rates. It should be known that between elections, “polls act as a feedback mechanism which could affect parties’ policy choices, whereas nearer to an election, they are feedback mechanism on how the campaign is going. So the polls by Sabi were a box ticking pathetic exercise which is meant to feed in a opposition sponsored narrative.
The polls are a danger to peace and a constructive destructive divisive action sponsored by the West.
However, their main use is prior to elections, where politicians use polls as a tool to inform their campaigns and to craft messaging. As such, they are not independent of the political process, Rather, they could also influence voters’ behaviour by affecting expectation about the outcomes of the election.
When people vote for the party they think is going to win, this is referred to as the ‘bandwagon effect’. This what the CCC is hoping to benefit from the false predictions. They are hoping to create a legitimate expectation in the elections which should justify them to reject the expected ZANU PF victory.
Because polling results around voting intentions are often publicised,the information they provide can influence voters’ perception of the various parties’ likelihood of winning an election, or the chances of being part of a coalition government. This can influence how people vote at the ballot box. When people vote for the party they think is going to win, this is referred to as the “bandwagon effect”. Alternatively, voters may evaluate parties more positively if their chances of winning appear to be good or evaluate parties more negatively if their chances seem to be low, in what is called the “boomerang effect”.
Opinion polls are valuable as they guide policy development by giving decision makers impartial information about what the public wants. But this requires pollsters to be both transparent and accurate in their statistical methodologies, something recent polling failures have called into question.
The publishing of that opinion was a mischievous well calculated campaign by the opposition using the opinion polls.
The dishonest way used in this polling is the main cause of error the sampling pollsters used – samples over-represented CCC supporters and under-represented ZANU PF supporters and the statistical weighting applied to the raw data were not sufficient to correct for the imbalance. Consequently, the samples were mainly unrepresentative of the population of voters, leading to the polling miss and exposing the underhand advantage in the election poll opinion.
The opinion would have been efficacious, but impossible in practice.
Polls are powerful – they can influence emotions and shape political fortunes. They can be used to drum up support for campaigns and reveal how closely aligned (or far apart) the general public is on consequential.
Like every election year, the 2023 elections have released a riptide of numbers as pundits and voters alike try to grasp their significance. At the national level, polls and primary results indeed will send people in some parts of the country wondering how to read surveys.
Rather than conduct a census of every single person to find out where the public stands on an issue or candidate, surveys sample opinions and can distill information that helps us better gauge our world. At their best, polls can empower the broader public to help influence crucial decisions. But it is important to recognize the limitations of surveys, in addition to the strengths. The surveys in question have been weaponised to decampaign ZANU PF.
One can expect a deluge of numbers as the presidential election approaches. Be cautious, though, as other recent vote predictions have been way off the mark.
By the time the country prepares to elect its next president in July 2023 , the news will be awash with numbers. As a result, some will feel confident they know what the results will be before they have even cast a vote. The question is, should we trust what these polls are telling us. We must not vote based on what a campaign which masquerade as an opinion poll has said
One may have noticed this: a new poll comes out – often a poll that was commissioned and published by a media company – and it gets heavily publicised by the media. In doing so, the media often increase the name recognition of whichever candidate is in the lead. As a result, that candidate becomes even more well known and gets an extra boost the next time people are surveyed.
This is known as a feedback loop, and it’s even more important in the early stage of the election cycle when the public is trying to spot someone they know.
Polls are estimates – ideally, very good estimates. The margin of error is a range that tells you how close that estimate gets to reflecting “the results that would have happened had we interviewed everyone.
It is sad that the polling organisations are now playing politics in Zimbabwe. The opinion published was not only wrong partisan and biased it was also shameful and mischievous.
ZANU PF will win the elections because it has invested in people.