NEW DELHI: Congress chief Rahul Gandhi once said, “Politics is everywhere… It’s in your shirt; it’s in your pants.” This is true in India where politics and elections have become dinner-table discussions in households. Owing to the growing interest in electoral results, exit polls and opinion polls have become popular. But are they really accurate? Over the past few years, it has been observed that exit polls have often failed to predict accurate results. Two recent examples are the 2015 Delhi assembly and the 2016 Tamil Nadu elections.
In the case of Delhi, most exit polls had predicted that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) would win with a tally of 40-45 seats. But Arvind Kejriwal stormed to power, bagging 67 seats in the 70-member assembly.
In the case of Tamil Nadu, all exit polls barring one predicted that the AIADMK would lose. But Jayalalithaa beat anti-incumbency, becoming the first Tamil Nadu chief minister in over 30 years to win successive elections.Experts say many factors lead to the discrepancy between exit poll figures and actual results. “Indian society is becoming more complex and political behaviour is more diverse. This is not being mapped accurately by pollsters as they do not have an authentic picture of the social dimension. This is resulting in pollsters not getting the right sample size,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, political analyst and author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times.
More recently, most pollsters had predicted a comfortable majority for the BJP in the Gujarat elections. BJP had the majority, but the exit poll tally and the actual number of seats were markedly different. While most exit polls predicted the BJP would secure 111-113 seats, it won only 99. A researcher who was part of an exit poll team said that in case of Gujarat, the fear factor among voters was a major reason for the predictions going wrong. “Gujarat was a special case. There were many people who did not vote for the BJP, but as the state has been held by the saffron party for over two decades, they were afraid to reveal their ballot choice. We only take into account what we have been told. Hence, the discrepancy in the exit poll and the actual result,” he said.
When exit polls are proved wrong, most pollsters begin to harp on the fact that they “got the winner right”. Mukhopadhyay said there was a transparency issue regarding the broadcast of these polls. “Some channels want to project the results in a certain way, hence there is a possibility that they deliberately show exit polls which are not concurrent with the received data,” he said. Another example of exit polls going wrong is the 2016 Uttar Pradesh elections. Most polls rightly predicted that the BJP would secure a majority but their seat tally went haywire. Most pollsters, barring one, gave the BJP between 190 and 230 seats. But the party won with 312 seats in the 403-member House.
Jai Mrug, director, Voter Mood Research (VMR), does not discredit the research put into getting exit poll numbers. “The transmission models from vote share to seat share need to be far more efficient,” he said.
In the 2015 Bihar election too, pollsters had given the BJP a comfortable victory in the 243-member House, but it ended up with a paltry 58. “Caste equations play a major role in Bihar. While some people are openly vocal and pledge their support to a leader from their caste, some others do it discreetly. It is very difficult to take an appropriate sample when caste comes into the equation,” the researcher said.