Dear Editor,
In its editorial on November 8, Trinidad Newsday wrote: “NACTA Got it Right”. Throughout the election campaign, NACTA was vilified for writing that the election was a contest between the PNM and UNCA and that COP would not win a seat. So once again, NACTA has called an election right.
The COP ran daily ads against me and the NACTA polls instead of focusing against the other two parties – ads that contain falsehoods and untruths – in daily newspapers and on radio and TV to discredit my work and malign my integrity and reputation. In addition, Newsday was criticized for carrying press releases from NACTA. COP spokespersons said NACTA press releases should not be published but had no problem with releases from the other polls published. COP spokes persons said the NACTA poll had an agenda of wanting to unite the UNC and COP to defeat the PNM. NACTA had no such agenda – we merely wanted to institutionalize polls and gave readers what people said they wanted.
Another newspaper, Guardian, banned its reporters and editors from carrying any of NACTA’s press releases. But when the election results came in on Monday night, the newspapers that published the NACTA findings were vindicated. Only NACTA got the election prediction right – spot on exactly as the Express front page headline had it a few days before the elections – 26 for PNM, 15 for UNC. Now that COP is wrong and discredited, one would think the party would apologize. Instead, the party has continued its vicious attack on me saying that I was responsible for it not winning a seat. In other words, the party believes the voters listened to me and decided not to give COP any seat. The party feels that if I had not written that COP would not win a seat, the party would have defeated the UNCA for opposition. This is foolishness at its height.
Newsday correctly commented that one issue that arose in the election campaign was the validity of political opinion polls. Seven different polling organizations conducted polls, each giving totally different predictions. And questions were raised as to the role such surveys played in a campaign. Newsday asked: Did they truly reflect public opinion? Or were they attempts to mislead public opinion by reflecting an illusory popularity for specific parties? The paper noted that as it turned out only one pollster – Vishnu Bisram of NACTA – got the outcome right. Going against the findings of other polling organisations, NACTA from the very start predicted a likely victory for the PNM and no seats for the COP. The paper added:
“NACTA was right where the St Augustine Research Associates led by Professor
Selwyn Ryan, the Barbadian-based CADRES group headed by Peter Wickham, or the UWI/Ansa McCAl Psychological Research Centre led by Derek Chadee, were nowhere near the mark. The latter three all predicted a close fight between the PNM and the COP, with the UNC trailing a distant third.
And they cannot argue, as pollsters are wont to do, that their polls were only a snapshot in time. If a pollster finds that a particular party has only five percent support, it is quite unlikely that this minuscule percentage will rise to 30 percent in five weeks, no matter how magnificent their launch or how much of an advertising blitz they run. Instead, the greater probability is that the pollster did not properly sample that party’s constituency bases. And the view of COP strategist Gerald Yetming, that the NACTA poll influenced the election’s outcome, only reveals his view of voters’ intelligence. After all the other three organisations which predicted a COP victory have far higher reputations – or had. What is especially embarrassing for these organisations is that, out of all the pollsters, Mr Bisram is the only one who is not a professional political scientist. Yet the results, not only from this election but the past three as well, show that his methodology is clearly superior to that of the professional pollsters. Despite this, Newsday was criticised for carrying his polls.
Newsday concluded by saying that the other pollsters need to do some stock-taking. The other pollsters have some fundamental flaw in their sampling or in their interpretation of the data. “In the case of CADRES, the fact that this poll was commissioned by the COP may have skewed Wickham’s results, for the phenomenon of scientists seeing what their paymasters want them to see is well-established. It is therefore relatively easy to make similar errors in opinion polls.
The fact that certain analysts have shown themselves incompetent to poll a general election should not create a negative view of polls generally. Properly done, such surveys are an effective scientific tool for creating a well-ordered society”.
Let me reiterate, NACTA is a professional organization that conducts its work with integrity and objectivity.
Yours faithfully,
Vishnu Bisram