The poll results are in and they tell us: French newspapers are giving up on pollsters
Campaign pamphlets supporting Manuel Valls, the former French prime minister, are stacked before distribution [Image: AFP/Getty].
Whether the ‘weighting’ they use is misplaced, or perhaps they are simply skewed to support the politics of whoever commissioned them, political opinion polls aren’t worth the time they take to read these days.
But still This Site gets bombarded with the latest nonsense from YouGov, ICM, Ipsos-MORI or whoever, the instant it sees the light of day.
Get a grip, people. Learn to recognise when somebody’s pulling your chain.
France’s love-hate relationship with opinion polls is in the spotlight after a newspaper announced it would stop commissioning polls in the run-up to the French presidential election and instead do more on-the-ground reporting to sound out the public mood.
The unprecedented decision by the daily Le Parisien came after months of discussion in the paper’s newsroom following the UK’s vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s election in the US – both of which caught media and some pollsters by surprise.
Source: French newspaper abandons opinion polls in run-up to election | World news | The Guardian
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If people don’t have enough knowledge or conviction of their own preferences and can only act on what polls suggest they should not be voting at all; as we have seen from recent polls they usually mislead.
Return to the toss of a coin, heads he wins tails he wins either way. Miliband was the best one, and of country are fed up with them guess work
In all honesty the polls are being abandoned by one French newspaper, Le Parisien, not because all polls are discredited and valueless but because the polls in respect to voting intention as per Francois Fillon and Marine Le Pen are too close, one or two points apart within the margin of error, to call the results of the French presidential election in advance. If Fillion was 14 points ahead of Le Pen, as Theresa May is ahead of Jeremy Corbyn, the French newspapers would all be saying that Fillon would almost certainly be the next French president rather than Le Pen.
The situation in the United Kingdom is nothing like the one in France, where the difference between polls between the two main candidates is very small while in Britain it is massive.
Either way, pollsters can’t be trusted, Paul.
Spot the pollster bigging up his job
Is this true, Paul?
On-the-ground reporting; is that not what the journalists should be doing? Who, here, has ever been asked about their opinion for a poll?
I have.