Prague, Nov 9 (CTK) – The victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election has again proved how misleading pre-election polls can be, representatives of Czech polling agencies told CTK yesterday.
Similar to the referenda on Brexit and on a peace agreement in Colombia, yesterday’s presidential election’s result has differed from the opinion polls’s predictions. One of the reasons might be that respondents were ashamed to admit their choice, the pollsters added.
CVVM agency head Nadezda Cadova said she would not consider the polls’ methods the reason why they differed from the election final result.
Renowned agencies carried out these polls in the United States and they applied the methods including all population groups, she added.
“However, you cannot force people who refuse to participate in a poll to answer the question and those might be exactly supporters of Donald Trump,” Cadova said.
She did not rule out that people did not want to admit their support for Trump in polls since they had a feeling this was publicly unacceptable and that a majority would vote for Hillary Clinton whom the media generally supported as well.
Cadova pointed out to the Brexit referendum whose result also differed from opinion polls. Most British dailies supported the staying in the EU, but the reality was the opposite, maybe out of spite since the media were promoting a certain opinion, she added.
STEM agency’s analyst Jitka Uhrova said support for Trump was to a high extent motivated by the feelings of frustration and discontent, which was not sufficiently reflected in polls.
The majority system of the U.S. presidential election also played a significant role in the final result, she added.
One of the factors that contributed to the election result that differed from the polls was also a wrong definition of “likely voters” who say they may go to elections, Daniel Prokop, from Median said.
American models include them in the calculation as voters though they may change their mind and not vote eventually, he added.
Prokop is also of the view that some respondents felt ashamed for their choice though no data proved this.
Trump would have probably received a considerably higher support in anonymous Internet polls, Prokop said.
Median had a similar experience in the March Slovak general election in the case of the far-right Kotleba-People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS) of Marian Kotleba whose 9-percent result was a major election surprise, Prokop said, adding that Kotleba’s voters did not dare to admit their choice in a phone poll, while his party enjoyed strong support on the Internet.
