Trevor Noah Hates Predictions!
In a recent segment of The Daily Show’s Between the Scenes, Trevor Noah said that “America’s predicting hurts its elections”. Noah suggested that polls should not be accessible to the public because people’s voting preferences should not change based on information about who is likely to win. In this post, I dissect the merits of this argument and discuss how it may influence elections.
There are two main mechanisms how voting decisions could be affected by polls. First, voters who perceive the outcome to be decided may stay home so that their vote is not “wasted”. A paper called ‘Exit polls, turnout, and bandwagon voting: evidence from a natural experiment’ published in the European Economic Review supports this idea. The paper uses a natural experiment where individuals in some French overseas territories voted after the election results had been made public from exit poll information in mainland France. They estimated that knowing the exit poll information decreased voter turnout by about 11 percentage points. Furthermore, they found that voters who choose to turn out are more likely to vote for the expected winner, a practice known as “Bandwagon Voting”.
Polling can also affect how people vote once they are in the booth. A paper called ‘Polls, coalition signals, and strategic voting: an experimental investigation of perception and effects’ published in the European Journal of Political Research found that voters in multi-party systems have an incentive to cast a vote that best influences the formation of the next government. In other words, they may decide to defect from their preferred candidate to cast a ballot for a less-preferred candidate but one that is more likely to be elected. These ‘strategic voters’ work with the candidates they have, not the candidates they want and the American primaries are a critical background where this plays out. For strategic voting to work however, voters must be able to form accurate expectations about the chances the different candidates. Without polls, this knowledge would be very difficult to obtain, and we might see a large decrease in strategic voting, where voters would instead vote for their most-preferred party.
Trevor Noah may “hate predictions”, but without polls there may be unintended consequences. Predicting the future is part of human nature, and we form opinions on the outcomes of all sorts of events, reaching far beyond political elections. In absence of polling, voters would likely to continue to predict outcomes but their predictions would be far less accurate. Polling provides critical information that helps us make decisions to maximize our potential benefit and without that information, we would fall short.
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