India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh (UP) goes to polls next year and stakes are very high for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had swept the general elections in the state in 2014. Opinion polls ‘gauging the mood’ of the state have started doing the rounds.

An ABP News-Lokniti opinion poll aired on Monday, August 22,showed the governing Samajwadi Party (SP) and BJP running neck and neck, with the main opposition party – Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) relegated to third position. Interestingly, ABP News was the only channel which to conduct a national survey in May this year predicting that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) would win a whopping 342 seats if elections were held then.

The results of the recent ABP News-Lokniti opinion polls were widely published by major newspapers including Indian Express and India Today. It may be recalled that in the run-up to Bihar Assembly elections last year, ABP News had predicted that BJP was doing very well in Bihar, but the actual results proved to be the exact opposite. BJP was routed by Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar’s mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance). Which begs the question: why does anyone – particularly journalistic publications – take these opinion polls seriously?

Lessons from US elections

Anybody who has followed presidential elections in United States of America will be missing one thing this year: the Gallup polls. The agency that is famous for its “horse race” polls, in which they would reflect which candidate was leading. They’ve done it for decades, but this year, there will be no Gallup prediction. The reason: Gallup’s horrible 2012 analysis, when it predicted Mitt Romney was ahead of Barack Obama in the presidential race.
The Gallup not only had lost credibility but also its partner – leading American newspaper – USA Today, which discontinued its long association with it. Gallup later claimed that they had identified “flawed methods that contributed to their incorrect prediction”. They attributed it to sampling and lack of having “a better way to identify who is likely to actually vote in the elections”.

What Gallup did in 2012 was seen in India in the run-up to the 2015 elections in Bihar. Predicting either a tie between BJP-led alliance and the Grand Alliance between Congress, Rashtriya Janata Dal and Janata Dal (United), or an outright National Democratic Alliance (NDA) victory, many pollsters lost credibility when NDA was routed in the polls and Nitish Kumar was re-elected as Chief Minister.

While Gallup’s fiasco was, according to them, a result of flawed processes of identifying likely voters, the issues with Indian pollsters appears to be more complicated.

‘Adjusting’ opinion polls for money

In the run-up to the May 2014 General elections, the India Today group announced that it was suspending all opinion polls conducted by agency C-Voter for the group. This, after a TV news channel ran a sting operation alleging that the pollster was ready to tweak the ‘margin of error’ to show one political party at an advantage.

Not only C-Voter but ten other agencies conducting opinion polls were “exposed” in a sting done by News Express. C-Voter denies the charges. Today’s Chanakya, a polling agency which had accurately predicted the 2014 election results, suffered a loss of reputation when its prediction that BJP would win the Bihar elections, fell flat on its face. Their explanation for the fiasco was that human error in data leading to interchanged number of seats – which basically means that seat numbers remained the same, but respective alliances got interchanged

Only one polling agency – Axis APM – had hit the bull’s eye with its exit polls during the Bihar elections. Strangely though, the results were not shown on any news channels. The agency released its findings on its website.  Others got the results wrong. India Today did project a victory for the Grand alliance, but it couldn’t gauge the extent of its huge victory margin.

The race for being the fastest

It wasn’t just opinion polls or exit polls, but on counting day, news channels were racing to be the first to call the elections.
Barely forty minutes into counting of votes, on the morning of November 8, 2015, NDTV had declared BJP the winner in Bihar with 145-149 seats. Soon, Barkha Dutt, who then had about two million followers on Twitter, tweeted that NDTV had called the elections. By 9am, celebrations erupted in the state BJP headquarters in Patna. What happened in the next two hours left the BJP completely shell-shocked – because the actual results were a complete turnaround of projections.

By evening, NDTV’s Prannoy Roy offered an “explanation and apology,” for both exit polls and the counting day chaos. He blamed the conclusion on “statistical margin of error” and recounted how it had been a “bad year” for polls. Extrapolating early trends in few seats to call the elections dented NDTV’s reputation.

Pollsters fail in rural areas

In the Indian socio-political jargon, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are routinely discussed in the same breath. Significant due to a largest number of Members of Parliament they send, both states are rightly perceived to pave the way to the Prime Minister’s Office for political parties. Both have a lot of things in common. Both are populous and have a history of proving pollsters horribly wrong. In the 2014 general elections, both voted for the BJP thereby, enabling Narendra Modi to become Prime Minister of India. The states handed the BJP a combined total of over 100 seats to BJP and its allies, almost 35 per cent of the total seats it won. But after two-years of anti-incumbency at the Centre, things have changed. Last year, Bihar decided to defeat BJP in the state elections despite opinion, exit poll predicting otherwise.

The pollsters heavily rely on in-person surveys. This means that to increase the coverage the interviewers need to cover all the areas the voters come from. Remote voters living mostly in poor Dalit villages are hardly interviewed and even if they were, the societal pressure ensures that the marginalised are less likely to speak the truth, lest dominant castes harm them. This adjustment related to the social dynamics is something the agency needs to make and they do not do it. Yogendra Yadav, a known psephologist, used to remark how Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mayawati tend to get underestimated in almost every survey or exit poll.

Media house–Businessmen-Political party nexus

In her Agra Rally on August 21, 2016, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati cautioned her supporters against corporate-owned media, which she said, will try to create negative sentiments about BSP by opinion polls and surveys in the run-up to the assembly elections. She cited the example of the 2007 Assembly elections, where no survey or exit poll had given BSP full majority and yet the party came to power on its own. It’s surprising that ABP news-Lokniti opinion poll was published the very next day, giving BSP the third spot after SP and BJP.

It is well known fact that most of the Indian media is owned by businessmen, who are believed to have close ties with political parties and politicians. The affiliation is obvious in some situations. Right after Bihar election results were out, Mukesh Ambani-owned CNN-News 18, then called CNN-IBN, tweeted out that Lalu Prasad Yadav of the victorious party was a ‘thug’ (this was widely criticised on social media).

In the run-up to the next general elections of 2019, three states that the BJP won handsomely in 2014 are very important: Bihar, UP and the PM’s own state of Gujarat. The first two, for their sheer size, and the third for being Modi’s much-touted model state. BJP lost Bihar  last year, so it knows UP and Gujarat will be extremely important in its quest to retain power in 2019 general elections.

In the coming months, media cronies of political parties will try their best to use all their energy to create a flood of opinion polls before the UP and Gujarat elections. Too many surveys and opinion polls will be thrown at us in the next few months.

But question is, after their Bihar fiasco, can we trust pollsters and channels for the upcoming UP elections?