How Turkey's pollsters missed the mark on election predictions
There are several reasons why all the major polling agencies performed so dismally in predicting the results of Turkey's Nov. 1 elections.
Add another group to the list of losers in Turkey's general elections: polling companies.
Turkey has provided fertile ground for pollsters, with four elections in less than two years. There are a dozen reputable companies that conduct periodic polls in different parts of the country. Most of these companies published frequent surveys about the snap elections on Nov. 1. Although the majority of them predicted a few points' gain for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), none were able to predict the AKP’s 8.5% rise. The closest prediction came from Gur's A&G Research, which showed the AKP at 47.2%, but the actual results fell outside A&G’s own 1.5% margin of error.
