Our Polls Are on the Mark. I Think.
By Jon Cohen
WashPost
Sunday, November 2, 2008
January, you may recall, was a rough month for the pollsters. All the polls showed Sen. Barack Obama poised to follow up his big win in the Iowa caucuses with a knockout blow to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the New Hampshire primary. But he lost, sending the 13 firms that did public pre-election polls there scrambling for explanations.
Could polling be similarly embarrassed this month, misjudging the last chapter of this epic presidential election? Thoughts of the Granite State jolt me and my fellow pollsters awake in the dead of night during these final days.
Sen. John McCain certainly says that the polls are misleading, arguing that most surveys have "consistently shown me much further behind than we actually are," as he put it last Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." Of course, blaming the polls is standard operating practice for trailing candidates, their partisans and contrarians everywhere. And of course, we won't make the same mistakes that led George Gallup to declare that Thomas Dewey had Harry Truman beat in 1948: We won't use outdated sampling techniques, and we won't assume that the race is over and stop polling. Nor is our polling window as absurdly small as the four nights between Iowa and New Hampshire. Even so, could McCain be onto something? In the latest Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll of likely voters, Obama has a nine-point lead, larger than Dewey's five-point margin in the late October Gallup poll in 1948. Other reputable national polls this year show similar or even larger Obama leads. But could we still make big mistakes? Can the polls be trusted?
As the polling director of The Washington Post, I get that question just about every day, even in less intense periods than this. Some question the scientific basis of polling, refusing to believe that interviews with hundreds or thousands of randomly selected respondents could accurately represent the opinions of many millions. Others see basic bias (refreshingly, these accusations come from all sides) or point out new wrinkles, such as the growing number of adults in the United States who have only cellular phones that pollsters mostly don't call. Added to the mix this year is a lingering skepticism about the accuracy of polling contests between white and black candidates -- doubts that persist despite decades of data suggesting that these polls perform no worse than others -- and heightened concerns about the way we define "likely voters."
(More here.)
WashPost
Sunday, November 2, 2008
January, you may recall, was a rough month for the pollsters. All the polls showed Sen. Barack Obama poised to follow up his big win in the Iowa caucuses with a knockout blow to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the New Hampshire primary. But he lost, sending the 13 firms that did public pre-election polls there scrambling for explanations.
Could polling be similarly embarrassed this month, misjudging the last chapter of this epic presidential election? Thoughts of the Granite State jolt me and my fellow pollsters awake in the dead of night during these final days.
Sen. John McCain certainly says that the polls are misleading, arguing that most surveys have "consistently shown me much further behind than we actually are," as he put it last Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." Of course, blaming the polls is standard operating practice for trailing candidates, their partisans and contrarians everywhere. And of course, we won't make the same mistakes that led George Gallup to declare that Thomas Dewey had Harry Truman beat in 1948: We won't use outdated sampling techniques, and we won't assume that the race is over and stop polling. Nor is our polling window as absurdly small as the four nights between Iowa and New Hampshire. Even so, could McCain be onto something? In the latest Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll of likely voters, Obama has a nine-point lead, larger than Dewey's five-point margin in the late October Gallup poll in 1948. Other reputable national polls this year show similar or even larger Obama leads. But could we still make big mistakes? Can the polls be trusted?
As the polling director of The Washington Post, I get that question just about every day, even in less intense periods than this. Some question the scientific basis of polling, refusing to believe that interviews with hundreds or thousands of randomly selected respondents could accurately represent the opinions of many millions. Others see basic bias (refreshingly, these accusations come from all sides) or point out new wrinkles, such as the growing number of adults in the United States who have only cellular phones that pollsters mostly don't call. Added to the mix this year is a lingering skepticism about the accuracy of polling contests between white and black candidates -- doubts that persist despite decades of data suggesting that these polls perform no worse than others -- and heightened concerns about the way we define "likely voters."
(More here.)
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