Why Pollfish Got It Right, When Most Polls Were Wrong

by Joe Shaheeli

Left over from the Trojan War of classical mythology history is the well-remembered phrase uttered after the fall of Troy: “Beware Greeks bearing gifts!”

For candidates looking for polling that could be a gift worth buying for themselves, they’d be wise to study the techniques used by the polling firm Pollfish and its Greek American founder, New Yorker John Papadakis. It’s a gift worth accepting.

His firm called the presidential election for Donald Trump weeks ahead. Even when most of the media, relying on major institutional polls as well as their own, called Hillary Clinton by a near landslide on election eve, Pollfish was predicting Trump.

Papadakis explains his polling data are not gleaned from telephone calling, mail surveys, or compiling the results of door-knockers. “We partner with the many thousands of app sites used by millions of users of computers and smart phones,” he says. “We have surveyed as many as 340 million people in the short space of several hours, tracking their app usage either on their smartphones or computers.”

His service is modeled to serve businesses as well as candidates. “We can give clients quick result on their ad campaigns, letting them know what works best,” he says.

His firm tracks activity on over 10,000 apps so he can boast from past elections and business customers how effective the predictions of his polling are. “For businesses, we give them a picture of how they are doing and how to attract more customers. For candidates, we can discover for them what their prospective voters want to see from a campaign, be it for the nation, large cities, or a legislative district,” he promises.

He adds, “Ask a question and we can get you the answer to what those in your area of concern want and need within an hour, and often, in less than a half-dozen hours. Run a television ad and we get you viewer opinion on what they had seen.”

Was Donald Trump right when he said polls failed to reach his supporters, allowing his silent majority to fly under the radar? Pollfish boasts it had the answer to why the President-Elect Donald Trump kept saying he would win with a “movement.”

While most polling outlets rely on robo-calling to gather sentiment, Papadakis states regular polling methods require a high level of sampling bias that leads to errors. But what if pollsters reached people who spend hours and hours every day on their cell phones? By capturing data in a real-time, non-intrusive way, election polling on mobile devices could yield much more-accurate and actionable insights.

By tapping into mobile data, Pollfish – now the leading mobile survey platform across the globe – was able to predict the election results with unprecedented accuracy. Pollfish’s bragging rights include correctly predicting outcomes in 45 of 50 states, in eight of 11 swing states’ and even Clinton’s victory in the popular vote.

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