Neil: I'm Neil.
Sam: And I'm Sam.
Predicting the future is not easy
but that's exactly the job of opinion pollsters –
researchers who ask people questions to discover
what they think about certain topics.
Often their aim is predicting which political party will win
in election by asking members of the public
how they intend to vote.
Neil: But predicting the future is never one hundred percent accurate,
and opinion polls don't always get it right.
In 2016, few pollsters predicted a victory for Donald Trump
over Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election.
Sam: And in the 2020 US elections,
most polls predicted Trump would lose to Joe Biden
by a much larger amount than he actually did.
These mistakes, sometimes called misfires -
when things do not work in the way intended -
have damaged the reputation of opinion pollsters.
In this programme we'll be taking a look into the opinion polling industry