The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Opinion Polls Ahead of Nigeria’s Elections

There must be a number of electoral activities at every stage of the election cycle before local and national elections in any nation. Campaigns, personality assessments of candidates, and agendas for the people are typically among the main activities. Political parties, candidates, and their supporters are expected to conduct campaigns under the auspices of the electoral body or any other recognized organizations tasked with ensuring the sustainable conduct of various activities throughout the electoral cycle.

On the other hand, voters, the media, and civil society organizations are expected to do the majority of the candidate evaluation. Most voters and civil society organizations evaluate candidates based on what the media wants them to think about the candidates through the selection of parts of their lives (candidates) and existing issues or needs perceived to be relevant for understanding the candidates’ ability and capacity.

On a larger scale, when groups or organizations evaluated candidates using polls or surveys with the goal of collecting the opinions of potential voters, the results typically drew mixed responses. While some beneficiaries who received high ratings or performed well are jubilant and anticipating the results to be reflected in the general election, those who received low ratings typically viewed the results as a pointless exercise with no scientific foundation.

Sometimes those who rejected the results were correct in their assessment of the results due to perceived flaws in the polling processes. Several political scientists and respected pollsters have documented the best practices for conducting public opinion polls. According to them, three essential guidelines for scientific polling are followed by all reliable surveys. First, the questions need to be phrased in a straightforward and objective way. Second, the sample’s subjects must be chosen at random. Third, the survey or poll’s sample size needs to be large enough for the sampling error to be considered acceptable. Sampling error is a common variation that happens when samples are taken.

Mediatizing and Journalistic Framing of Poll Results

The results of any poll in which one of these principles is missing will be controversial for a long time unless the pollster addresses the problem. Aside from breaking these standard rules, the results of a poll with a single question should be used with caution. This is largely based on the fact that a question is insufficient for transforming individuals’ perspectives into a concrete assessment of candidates due to the devil of using a unit of analysis to judge complex personality traits and competencies of candidates in relation to issues and challenges that must have been mediatized by selecting and priming certain perceived realities in such a way that the audience considers the realities as more important than others.

Apart from mediatizing issues and challenges relating to candidates and their political parties, media organizations also prefer framing poll results in ways that potential voters should consider any candidate before voting. For example, various media outlets have reported the results of a recent poll conducted by NOI poll, which was commissioned by another organization, using various frames and agendas.

While reporting the poll, The Premium Times used “2023: Poll shows Peter Obi leads Tinubu, Atiku, Kwankwaso” as its headline. Vanguard considered “2023: Peter Obi leads in presidential Poll”. It is clear from the inclusion of candidates that the two newspapers reported the same thing about the main presidential candidates ahead of the election. However, as used by The Premium Times, the poll indicates how the public should interpret candidates’ potential performance during the election. In contrast, Vanguard’s inclusion of the word “presidential” alongside the poll depicts Mr Peter Obi as the winner of the 2023 presidential election. Despite Vanguard’s headline risky positioning of the Labour Party’s candidate to the public, the newspaper still conveyed the pollster’s message.

Strategic Options

There is no denying that public opinion can have a significant impact on a nation’s political and electoral development. However, it must be carried out with sincerity and a true sense of patriotism. Pollsters should make sure that the previously stated correct scientific principles are strictly followed when conducting polls. Our analyst recommends that pollsters take into account big data from new media in addition to conventional polling techniques.

This will go a long way toward addressing the risks of relying on the small amounts of data that conventional polling methods typically produce. For instance, 3,000 potential voters out of a million registered voters is a small sample size, making it impossible to generalize the results.