THE influence of polling may be waning. First it was India. Even up to the last two days of the election, the polls showed a majority result for Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It did not happen. The BJP lost more than 50 seats, some in strong Hindu districts.

Now it is in the US that the prestige of polling has taken a beating. After the debate between Trump and Harris, the polls put her ahead of Trump. From that time until polling closed, Trump was not ahead. Days before the election, they were neck and neck. But Trump trounced Harris by margins that were never imagined by the people in the US and around the world that followed the election.
Polling is a very technical thing. Everything about polling has to be impeccable for there to be accuracy. You wonder if there could ever be accuracy because of two dimensions of polling. The demography has to be neatly in place. Your samples have to reflect the age, gender and class components of society.

In Guyana, you will be ridiculed if your samples do not reflect the strength of the Region Four population. You cannot put questions to 100 persons in Berbice and use the same numbers for Region Four. Your results will be skewed. It is the same with the questions.
Once your questions are not subjective and are value free, there will be more accuracy. But even here, who is to judge which questions are potently perfect? Why Trump was not in the lead the week before the elections had to do with how the questions were put to the interviewees after his weak performance in the debate. I have a feeling that after the debate, the questionnaire had leading questions that favoured Ms Harris.

The second absorbing dimension relates to mega star– Taylor Swift. The past 60 years, only Elvis Priestly and Michael Jackson as Americans were bigger than Swift. I discount the Beatles because they were not homegrown. She has dozens of millions of fans. Did she bring dozens of millions of votes to Harris? The answer is no and the reason why the answer is no is because of the nature of human psychology.

Jamaicans love the style and personality of Chris Gayle, but that will not necessarily transform into embracing Gayle’s political choices. Jamaicans love Gayle for who he is and he is a sports star. Humans compartmentalise their psychology. They love a singer or an actor or a sports personality, but who says they want their heroes to be politicians.

It is clear that Swift did not dent the support of Trump. It is the same with Obama. He asked the British people to reject Brexit. But in as much as they admired Obama, they voted for Brexit because they thought it was not a thing that Obama should concern himself with. This is a huge mistake celebrities keep making the past 100 years and they will continue to make it.

They believe their stellar status could translate into political success. They fail to understand that although they are loved, people have other interests to protect and in the American and Indian elections, bread and butter issues were on the top of their agenda. In a most stunning reversal in modern politics, the BJP lost Hindu votes in a district where the BJP made Hindu religion the only item on the agenda.
The third interesting factor in the defeat of Harris is the mentalities of African- American politicians. I interviewed former president Donald Ramotar for his take on why Trump won, and the first thing he said was that he was pleased with cross-racial voting in the election. And he was 100 per cent correct.

Obama and Harris did not put in the energy in Black parts of the US that they expended in White areas. They believed that they had the Black votes sewed. After all, they tell themselves, which Black American will leave a Black woman and vote for Trump. The statistics have left Obama and Harris so stunned that it may take years to recover. Young Black men and woman, Hispanics, Latinos and Arabs contributed to Trump winning the popular vote.

One of the ghosts living inside the Democratic Party is Barack Obama. The Democratic party has to understand and quickly that whoever Obama endorses may lose because Black youths and the American Black working class felt that after eight years in office, they have not seen what the phenomenal rise of Obama did for them. The Obama era came and went and Harris was too blind to see that. It is a mistake she will live with for the rest of her life.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.