Spring Break
Polls don't always reflect election reality
Matt Stevens
Issue date: 11/3/08 Section: Election Special
A pollster whose interviewees were practically all White upper-class suburbanites would almost certainly be predicting an overwhelming McCain victory. Another common polling mistake is too much overreliance on telephones to reach people. For starters, only people with regular telephones are reached for interviews. People who only use cell phones are not going to be included in the survey. And even if a household is randomly called, chances are that the sample will wind up being biased in favor of Democrats because, generally speaking, women tend to do more telephone answering than men do, and women tend to be more liberal and inclined toward Democrats. Lastly, if pollsters conducting the infamous Election Day exit polls want to make a truly accurate prediction, they must make sure that they sample diverse polling places that will be representative of the voting population. If a hypothetical pollster only went to polling places in rural areas, he or she would almost certainly be predicting a McCain victory, for example.
George Gallup is considered the father of the modern political poll. Gallup was the first person to poll using scientific methods. Gallup came to prominence in 1936, when his methods correctly predicted a landslide victory for President Franklin Roosevelt. Gallup's use of scientific methods in polling all but discredited the old methods used for polling, like the one used by the magazine Literary Digest that same year, which consisted of sending out questionnaires to automobile owners. This poll projected that Kansas Gov. Alf Landon would easily defeat the president! Its flaw? By sending the questionnaire only to automobile owners in the middle of the Great Depression, wealthy Americans were overrepresented in the sample. And since wealthy Americans tend to be Republicans, it is no wonder the Literary Digest poll got the result that it did. Despite Gallup's revolutionary polling techniques, mistakes are still made by pollsters, which lead to inaccurate predictions about elections.
George Gallup is considered the father of the modern political poll. Gallup was the first person to poll using scientific methods. Gallup came to prominence in 1936, when his methods correctly predicted a landslide victory for President Franklin Roosevelt. Gallup's use of scientific methods in polling all but discredited the old methods used for polling, like the one used by the magazine Literary Digest that same year, which consisted of sending out questionnaires to automobile owners. This poll projected that Kansas Gov. Alf Landon would easily defeat the president! Its flaw? By sending the questionnaire only to automobile owners in the middle of the Great Depression, wealthy Americans were overrepresented in the sample. And since wealthy Americans tend to be Republicans, it is no wonder the Literary Digest poll got the result that it did. Despite Gallup's revolutionary polling techniques, mistakes are still made by pollsters, which lead to inaccurate predictions about elections.
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