When Prime Minister Scott Morrison pulled off a surprise victory in the Australia election it came as a solid surprise. Morrison himself called it a ‘miracle’. After six years of rule by his Liberal Party, every recent opinion poll had predicted a solid victory for the opposition Labour Party, who had campaigned on climate change and ‘class warfare’, as former PM John Howard put it. In the wake of the chock result commentators compared it to Brexit and Trump, two other recent high-profile electoral results which defied opinion polls.
It is certainly true that the track record of polling agencies has suffered some blows in recent years. And there seems to be a trend in the errors: when polls get it wrong, the right wing seems to get a higher share of the vote than predicted.
This phenomenon has been known for some time. In British politics, what is known as the ‘shy Tory factor’ has been around since the 90s, where it could be observed how the Conservative Party systematically fared better in elections than predicted. Seemingly, some Tory voters are reluctant to confess to pollsters their intention to vote for the party. A similar trend has been observed for the US Republican party.
And it should come as no surprise that in this age of political hysteria the phenomenon is manifesting itself with increasing frequency. The sanctimonious left wing has long decried their opponents as racists and bigots, but their emotive hyperbole has increasingly found its way into the mainstream. Labour MP David Lammy recently compared the Tory European Research Group to Nazis and apartheidists. Hillary Clinton famously labelled Trump voters a ‘basket of deplorables’. Of course, anyone who voted for Brexit runs the risk of being derided as a racist. Amongst the young, social media has become left-wing echo chambers where anyone right-leaning are not just political opponents but bad people. At universities, being openly right-wing means exposing yourself to abuse. Of course, cases like the James Damore fiasco show that holding the ‘wrong’ opinions can have more than just social costs.
With a price to pay for being openly right wing, it should come as no surprise when some people hold back with declaring their allegiance – and this apparently increasingly means to pollsters too. When being right-wing is labelled being ‘far right’, large parts of the electorate fall into this bucket of deplorables and may become uncomfortable with answering honestly, except in the privacy of the polling booth. Whether this phenomenon is more than a temporary aberration, only time can tell. But is the current trend continues, we may not only see more surprise victories for the right, we may be witnessing the death of the opinion poll.