Viewpoint: Is opinion polling broken?

This is not something that has suddenly happened this year, this has been something brewing for a number of years, and I'm really beginning to more than question the accuracy of the polls.  I'm actually beginning to think that the whole process of opinion polling may now be fatally flawed, or at best compromised badly.

Now, there have been some changes to what is prompted by the questioners, but in my view, that is not the big problem.  My feeling is that the biggest issue right now with opinion polling is the way it is conducted right now, and how they select the people they interview.

Some pollsters now use a regular group of volunteers polling them on the internet.  Then they weight the results based on demographic information.  This I feel is seriously flawed, because it is open to manipulation.  Anybody can volunteer to give their time to the polling companies, and often, I suspect that some parties might try to get their operatives to volunteer to load the system up with representatives of a particular party.  The weighting aspect of this method is also flawed, because it's based on a lot of assumptions that don't actually always play out as you think they would. 

Those that still rely on telephone calls to canvas potential voters, are also somewhat flawed.  Calls from polling companies are often cold calls, and as such are not treated well by respondents.  The idea that you can get an accurate idea of opinions from a bunch of random cold calls, is a seriously flawed idea.

The net result is reflected in the actual results of the polls themselves.  Since Boris Johnson took over as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister, he has stumbled so many times that he makes his predecessor Theresa May look actually competent.  He lost almost all of the key votes in Parliament in the short time he was in there as PM, he lost a battle in the courts over an illegal prorogation of Parliament., and he's been losing and poorly performing in TV debates already.  Yet, this week, a poll by Opinionum for The Observer, put Boris Johnson's Conservatives 19% ahead of everybody else. 

This does not add up.  Public perception of Boris Johnson is not a good one.  He's seen as an incompetent blunderer, full of bluster and Brexit, full of sound and fury signifying absolutely nothing.  Even within his own party, he's not seen as a great politician.  Yet somehow, his party has a massive lead in the polls?  How on earth do you square that circle of hell?  Nothing about that adds up at all.

Jeremy Corbyn hasn't been viewed as a competent leader of the Opposition.  This is despite him inflicting more government defeats in his time as leader of the Opposition than any previous opposition leader in the modern era.  And whilst some of his decisions have been questionable, any lack of competence he has shown pales into insignificance behind the incompetence of both Boris Johnson, and his predecessor Theresa May as PM.

To my practiced eyes and mind, something isn't adding up here, and not all of this can be blamed entirely on the media, as much as many might like to believe that to be the case.  Sure some of it can be blamed on media bias, but the Tory press is a dying medium right now, they are losing readers, they are losing money, and they just can't be the only factor.  A contributing factor yes, but not the main one.

And as Sherlock Holmes would say, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth.  So, we must look to the polling methodologies themselves, and how flawed they are, and as I've already stated, they are seriously flawed, compromised beyond reasonable expectations.

Even the Exit Polls of the two previous elections in 2015 and 2017, which are done face to face, rather than over the phone or by internet, have been a bit off the mark when it came to actually predicting the result.  Granted they weren't as far off the mark as they were back in 1992, when they completely screwed up, but it's far enough for me to question their reliability.  In other countries, exit polling has been much more accurate in predicting the result.  It does leave me wondering how we on the UK aren't able to get it right when other countries pollsters can.

That's why I question the weighting that is given to polls.  It seems to be at least a bit out of sync with actual reality.

Overall, I have to believe that something is serious wrong in the world of opinion polling, and yes, it might be broken, maybe even broken beyond repair.

Viewpoint: Trump & Republicans in full self destruct.

For a while now, we've been watching the slow and painful disintegration of both Donald Trump's regime in the White House, and the Republican Party in Congress, and wondering when exactly the final cataclysmic explosion of both was going to happen.

From reports I'm seeing online, it truly looks like we are at the beginning of what we know from the James Bond films as the big final fight that leads to the final cataclysmic explosion of the villains base, and the death of the main villain, although in this case, it's the destruction of the Trump regime and the Republican Party with them.

At this point, Trump can only count on his base to support him, and his base isn't anywhere near as big as it was.  His base now only consists of extremists on the far right of the political spectrum.  Even Moderate Republicans, along with Independents, Centrists and Democrats, are now seeing Trump for who he really is, and they don't like it either.

But the Republican Party in Congress haven't caught up with this, and they're trying their damnedest to either protect him or come up with successful distraction strategies, but they seem to be failing with both.

And what makes it worse, is that we are seeing the Trump regime revive the classic Republican trope of the circular firing squad, and try to take each other out in order to avoid getting taken out themselves.  The amount of panic in the Trump regime is growing exponentially and the net result of all this is what we are currently seeing.

In the ongoing public impeachment hearings, several Trump administration officials have repeatedly given testimony pointing to Donald Trump's guilt and that's causing mass panic in the Republican camp and in the Trump regime.  Donald Trump even managed to take over Fox & Friends on Friday morning to claim that this impeachment is going great for him, and he's looking forward to his trial in the Senate, in an hour long rant that even the hosts were feeling somewhat uncomfortable about at some points.  Then Republicans in Congress began parroting this same idea, and some people actually fell for it.

However, this was all undone by the end of the day when reports came out from inside the White House via the Washington Post and the New York Times, that Trump was "miserable" in the White House and was finding the whole situation "intolerable".  It was then further undone when Trump called Republican senators to Camp David to 'persuade them' not to convict him.  If you honestly thought that the Impeachment proceedings against you were going well for you, then why would you call your buddies from the Senate to persuade them not to convict you?  The answer of course is that you wouldn't.  So, that totally destroyed the narrative that you had set up earlier in the day.

This is just adding further hard evidence against Trump.  It shows just how corrupt he is and that he thinks he can somehow subvert the whole process.  However, he fails to recognise the underlying truth about all Republican politicians in both the House and the Senate.  That truth is that when it comes to making sure they get re-elected, the President of the United States has absolutely no say in their decisions, because it isn't about protecting him, it's about protecting themselves.  If the numbers in their state or their district say that convicting him is their only course of action, they will convict him.  It's not the extremists that win elections, it's the moderates on both sides, and the Centrists and Independents.  If a Republican thinks they can win more votes by convicting him, than by not convicting him, they will do it, and the numbers generally look like that's more likely to happen than not.

Of course this leads to the next question, which is will enough voters switch to vote for a Republican if they do convict him.  This at the moment doesn't look so clear cut, and the possibility of Republicans losing what had previously been considered to be fairly safe seats is a not insignificant one.  At the moment, there doesn't seem to be enough of a swing against the Republicans to wipe them out in the House, nor enough to ensure a clean sweep of Democrat victories in the one third of Senate seats that will be up for grabs.  But that could change, and based on what is currently happening, it's a change that could hurt Republicans even more than it already is.

For instance, there is Trump's personal lawyer, Former New York Mayor and walking 9/11 meme, Rudy Giuliani.  He's already in a boat load of trouble, and it got worse this past week, as not only were House Republicans more than ready to throw him under the bus to protect Trump, but also when it was revealed in the New York Times, that the Feds has subpoenaed a Pro-Trump Super PAC in an investigation that is about 3 people.  Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman... and Rudy Giuliani.  Parnas and Fruman are associates of Rudy's, and Parnas was even born in the Ukraine, when it was still part of the Soviet Union.  Fruman was born in Belarus, so both are immigrants, which further adds another level of hypocrisy to the Republicans' anti-immigrant stance.

Now, Super PACs rarely get subpoenaed, so this is in itself, quite a big deal.  A PAC is a Political Action Committee, which is basically a group that pools campaign contributions from its members and donates them to campaigns for candidates, or ballot initiatives, or legislation.  In the wake of the Citizens United decision, a new kind of PAC was created, known as the Super PAC.  Whilst PAC have set limits on what members can donate, Super PACs do not, and they can engage in political activity independently of the campaign they are supporting.  However they are barred from making actual contributions to candidates or parties.

Now, it seems likely that these subpoenas relate to donations to that Super PAC from foreign donors, which is illegal under US Electoral Law.  Parnas and Fruman are already in some trouble for sourcing illegal foreign campaign contributions, so it's very possible that these subpoenas might relate to funneling foreign money through the Super PAC to Donald Trump, which as I've already pointed out, Super PACs are barred from making contributions.  If this is the case, then Parnas, Fruman, Giuliani and Trump are all potentially in boiling hot water.  Parnas has even said to CNN that he's willing to testify to Congress about the roles of Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, and Republican Representative Devin Nunes's roles in the whole Ukraine situation.  Not only could this throw both Giuliani and Trump under the bus, but it also opens up the possibility that Republican politicians in Washington are in this whole mess up to their eyeballs, and if that's the case, then that could lead to further revelations about othe Republican politicians in Washington and their connections and it could compromise the whole of the Washington Republican establishment, and that could really spell trouble for the Republican Party.

And that's the just the tip of the iceberg.  A grand jury in New York has the Trump Organisation firmly in its sights at the moment in relation to Trump's hush money scandals, and looks likely to indict not only Donald Trump himself, but also members of his family as well, on State charges, which Trump cannot pardon himself for.

Then there's Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo, who was just sold out by State Department officials, who were forced to turn over materials relating to the Ukraine situation to a court.  A judge had ordered these documents turned over before Midnight Friday.  But then it was revealed that Pompeo had leaked to the media that he was going to resign from the State Department to run for the US Senate in Kansas, which might be a pipe dream considering he too is up to his neck in the whole situation, and could well be arrested.

And there's probably a lot more that we don't yet know.  But this is very much what happens when a criminal conspiracy is unraveling before you.  Normally the best move would be to stick together, try and ride things out together.  But the old saying about there being no honour among thieves, is one that is proven true time and again, because individual players will start thinking about what will protect themselves, usually in a panicky state, and will often make the situation for themselves and everybody else in the conspiracy, because these panic moves usually backfire.

To seasoned observers of Washington politics, this is following predictable patterns of behaviour to their logical conclusion.  We've been witness to a party that has actually been slowly disintegrating since the days of Watergate, and now, we're seeing what could be the start of the final disintegration of the Republican Party as a political force, via the corrupt dealings of the Trump regime.  Something else will come along to replace it unquestionably.  This happened before in the 1860s, when the Republican Party itself emerged out of the ashes of the Whig Party in the US.  But this could be even more damaging than the Whig's self induced implosion, which didn't have a trigger for it on a scale anywhere near this big.  What would happen in the aftermath of this, is very much uncharted territory, and it will be interesting to watch it play out.  Right now though, it is kinda fun and kinda painful, to watch both the Trump regime and the Republican Party hit the self destruct button repeatedly and to see the whole situation blowup, just like watching the villain's base in the James Bond films get destroyed in explosion after explosion.

Viewpoint: Israel has their second election in 6 months.

This is something I'll be looking to cover on my Live & Direct radio show next Monday, but I'll use the blog here to pull together my thoughts as we go.  Also, in relation to the blog, I'll use this blog now to focus on some of the stories I may well be talking about on the show, which will give you an insight into what comes into my stream of consciousness during pre-production of the weekly show.

So, at 8pm UK time, 2200 in Israel, 1900 GMT, the polls closed and the exit polls were announced.  Now, in the UK, we get a single exit poll, that all the major broadcasters commission.  In Israel, the situation is a little different, as there as 3 different exit polls, but none of them have The Likud Party leading, and one has them behind.  It's basically too close to call right now, but the early indications point to the centrist Blue & White Party having the most seats.

Now, if the actual results bear this out, this could be the end of Benjamin Netanyahu's political career, as he is facing allegations of corruption.  Bibi was hoping that he could win this election so he could persuade potential allies on the right to back a piece of legislation that would make him immune from prosecution.  But it looks like that strategy may have backfired spectacularly.  And even if he does win, after the past 5 months of failing to garner a coalition for government, it would be unlikely to believe that a coalition could form around such a controversial idea, as making a politician immune from prosecution.

We'll see what happens in the upcoming hours and days.