Polling and Public Opinion

Question 1

How do campaigns use polling to inform their strategic decisions?

Answer 1

Media organizations, campaigns, parties, and PACs partner with
polling firms or academic institutions to conduct polls throughout the
campaign season
* Need to know which states/precincts candidates are most competitive in

Question 2

What makes accurate polling so difficult? Why are polls sometimes accurate and sometimes not? What are the polling best practices?

Answer 2

Live Telephone Interviews
* Human pollsters call landlines and cellphones to conduct interviews
* Phone numbers are randomly generated and dialed
* Can only use this method with landlines, cell phones must be manually dialed by a
person
* Generally, the most accurate type of polling
* But also, the most expensive form of polling
* Need live interviewers
* Need to making thousands of calls to generate a large enough sample

Inaccurate
* Overrepresentation of Democrats in polls
* More enthusiastic voters at the time, bored at home during the pandemic
* Non-response by Republicans and low-propensity voters
* There may be systematic differences between Republicans who answer polls
and Republicans who don’t

Why they’re sometimes accurate
The top pollsters have done a good job correcting for the previous mistakes
from prior elections
* Trump is a unique political actor that “throws off” polling (2018 was
accurately polled, 2020 was not)

Question 3

In what ways is polling biased? Who answers polls? Who doesn’t? When has polling been accurate? When has it not?

Answer 3

Who takes surveys and who doesn’t
* Survey respondents tend to be more Democratic, older, white, and
better educated
* Pollsters in 2016 failed to recognize the education gap in their polls, which led
to an underestimation of Trump’s support
* Some pollsters now will oversample certain populations to account
for this

In what ways is polling biased?
sampling or systematic
bias in question wording

When has polling been accurate?
Polls were remarkably accurate in 2022
* But why?
* The top pollsters have done a good job correcting for the previous mistakes
from prior elections
* Trump is a unique political actor that “throws off” polling (2018 was
accurately polled, 2020 was not)

When has it not?
Following 2016 (and a lesser extent 2020), the conventional wisdom
became you can’t trust polls
* Polls in 2016 systematically underestimated non-college educated
support for Trump and low-propensity voters in the Rust Belt
* But, national polls were actually correct, given that Hillary Clinton
won the national popular vote

2020 Election
* Polls continued to underestimate Trump’s strength
* The generic ballot also significantly underestimated Republican
strength
* All though Dems won the Presidency and Senate, they lost seats in the House