Pollsters who predicted Trump win benefit
from industry's miss
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[November 11, 2016]
By David Ingram and Jeffrey Dastin
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A handful of small
public opinion polling companies that bucked consensus and accurately
called the U.S. presidential election for Republican Donald Trump are
reporting being flooded with calls from investors and clients seeking
their services.
Most pollsters wrongly forecast Democrat Hillary Clinton as leading
Trump ahead of Tuesday's election in the latest fiasco to hit the $20
billion public opinion research industry, only months after it failed to
predict the British vote to leave the European Union in a June
referendum.
Among the few that got it right was a new industry player using a
different method, South African firm Brandseye, which analyzes social
media posts.
With offices in Capetown and Johannesburg, Brandseye took an entirely
different approach from traditional polling.
The data-miner pays people around the world to sift through social media
for relevant posts, a process known as crowd-sourcing, and then uses a
computer algorithm to rate consumer sentiment about products or
politicians.
Its method pointed to a Trump victory. It also correctly called
Britain's Brexit vote.
"My phone has not stopped," CEO and part owner JP Kloppers said in a
telephone interview on Thursday.
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Kloppers said venture capitalists have been calling about investing in
the firm, and polling companies have inquired about its methods.
Kloppers said the company was open to licensing its technology.
Existing clients include ride-sharing firm Uber, banks,
telecommunications firms and some government agencies, he said. He
declined to identify the governments.
"Elections come every couple of years, but there are companies and
governments that need to understand every day and every week what's
driving customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction," Kloppers said.
New methods, if successful, are of high interest to polling companies
that are having difficulty reaching cellphone users or survey-weary
Americans.
"The answer is ongoing research," said Krista Jenkins, director of the
PublicMind survey research center at Fairleigh Dickinson University in
New Jersey. "It's basically digging in as an industry and comparing the
findings from your traditional telephone polls to data that is collected
online."
POLLSTER ERRORS
Traditional pollsters base their results on questions posed to randomly
selected people, often in interviews conducted live over the telephone.
Among other errors that pollsters made ahead of the U.S election, they
almost universally miscalculated how turnout would be distributed among
demographic groups.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2016/Nov/11/images/ads/current/ldn_business_directory_small_2016.png)
High-profile London-based polling agency YouGov PLC's stock dropped 4
percent on Wednesday after its new method of surveying people online
failed to accurately predict the U.S. presidential election's outcome.
Analysts were split on the reason behind the drop, and YouGov stock
partly recovered on Thursday, closing up 2 percent in London trading.
No one from YouGov, which primarily does research for corporations, was
immediately available to comment on the business implications of the
polling miss, a spokesman said.
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![](../images/111116pics/news_x45.jpg)
President-elect Donald Trump arrives to speak at his election night
rally in Manhattan, New York, U.S., November 9, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo
Allegri
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The Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project gave Clinton a 90
percent probability of winning the 270 electoral votes needed to
secure the election. On its website, one of the possible scenarios
was how Trump could win the election by adjusting turnout levels.
Ipsos SA will assess what it got wrong, said Clifford Young,
president of the French research company's U.S. public affairs unit.
Election polling is generally not a big money-maker. Many polls are
done by universities or the media, while private research companies
use it to market themselves to corporate clients that provide more
profitable work.
Pioneering U.S. pollster Gallup last year abandoned head-to-head
polls for the presidential race, saying it wanted to focus its
resources on polls about issues.
The outfits that wrongly foresaw a Clinton victory will suffer
damage to their reputation, said Alex DeGroote, a London-based
analyst at Peel Hunt LLP who follows the industry.
"They attach their brand to these polls. If these polls continue to
flop, it's not going to help their brand credibility," DeGroote
said.
Among this year's winners may be Remington Research Group. The
Kansas City, Missouri-based pollster correctly predicted that Trump
would win the election battleground states of Florida, North
Carolina and Ohio, although it missed Trump's surprising Wisconsin
victory.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2016/Nov/11/images/ads/current/aaa_lda_FFARM_2016.png)
The company, which frequently works with Republican politicians,
conducts a mix of automated phone interviews and live phone
interviews. It may have done relatively well because other firms
were afraid of standing out from the crowd, said Titus Bond, the
group's director.
"A lot of pollsters, they want to be at the same number as everyone
else," Bond said.
Bond said he received three calls on the morning after the election
from corporate clients in the pharmaceutical and fertilizer
industries and three others from advocacy groups, all seeking to do
business.
(Reporting by David Ingram and Jeffrey Dastin; Editing by Will
Dunham)
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