Election Surprises: Why We Need to Look Beyond the Polls

In yet one more election twist, France's center-right Republican party selected former Prime Minister François Fillon as their candidate in the country's 2017 presidential race. His surprise victory - most polls had him in third place, behind former President Nicolas Sarkozy and another former Prime Minister, Alain Juppé - is just the latest in a string of unexpected election outcomes this year.

Eurasia Group's Global Macro director Willis Sparks explains why we need to look beyond what the polls are telling us as we head into 2017.  
Willis Sparks:
 
We have another new election result to talk about. This one from France. François Fillon has won the center-right party, the so-called Republican Party's nomination for President of France next year.

So clearly Mr. Fillon is going to win the entire election because the current president, François Hollande of the Socialist Party, has an approval rating of about 4%. And the other major candidate, the far-right candidate of the Front National, Marine Le Pen, can't possibly be elected president of France.

So François Fillon will be elected President of France and he can get on with the business of negotiating the future of transatlantic relations with U.S. President Hillary Clinton.

Okay, so you see what I did there.

Once again the polls have let us down. Mr. Fillon only led in one of the polls leading up to the first round vote before it became clear that he was going to win the second round.

Just as we saw before Brexit, just as we saw before the Clinton-Trump election in the U.S., the polls were not a reliable indicator of who was going to vote and who they were going to vote for.

It's important to keep this in mind: this idea that we need to expand our conception of what is possible and to look beyond what the polls tell us as we look forward, not just to 2017, but to a very important referendum coming up this very weekend in Italy. An important vote on constitutional reform in Italy that will determine a lot of the future of that country politically as well possibly as the future of the Eurozone.

And then we move into 2017, we have that presidential election in France and we have national elections in Germany in the fall.

Something to think about as we move toward another year of big decisions.