A poll (fl. 1948- ) is a survey of public opinion. You see them in the news, especially during election campaigns where they give a rough idea of who is ahead and who is behind and by how much.
Pollsters, who carry out the polls, do not ask everyone in the country. Instead they ask a random sample of hundreds or thousands of people, people chosen by chance from across the country. By asking just 400 people in a country the size of the US there is a 95% chance you will be within 4.9 percentage points of the number you would get if you asked everyone. Pretty amazing. That margin of error can be brought down by asking more people. Asking 800 brings it down to 3.5 percentage points. Asking 10,000 brings it down to 1 point.
Because some people are harder to reach than others, like young people or people of colour, most pollsters demographically weight the answers they get, like by age and race, so that it matches the country as a whole.
The better polls tend to be:
- done by top news outlets;
- done by pollsters you have heard of;
- done using live telephone interviews instead of robocalls or online surveys.
Note that some polls are fake!
Here are some US pollsters rated by how well they have done in the past (according to FiveThirtyEight.com):
- A+ Monmouth University
- A+ ABC News/Washington Post
- A Marist
- A- CNN
- A- CBS News/New York Times
- A- NBC News/Wall Street Journal
- A- Los Angeles Times
- A- Time
- A- Quinnipiac
- A- Ipsos
- B+ Public Policy Polling
- B+ Pew
- B Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Corp
- B YouGov
- B- Gallup
- B- NPR
- B- Gravis
- B- RAND
- C+ Rasmussen
- C- Zogby
- C- SurveyMonkey
Even polls done by the best pollsters will show a consistent bias or house effect. For example, in the 2016 US election, NBC polls favour Hillary Clinton, those by the Los Angeles Times favour Donald Trump.
Some try to “unskew” a given poll. That is generally a waste of time. Instead:
An average of polls is way better than any single poll. That is because:
- The sample size of all the polls together will be greater and the margin of error therefore lower.
- The house effect of different polls will tend to cancel each other out.
For US elections, Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight keep a running average of polls.
Polls done closer to election day are more likely to be right.
The Bradley Effect is where people lie to pollsters so as not to seem racist. It seems that was true in the 1980s and 1990s, but not since.
Crowd size: Some say the polls cannot be right because they do not match how many people come out to see candidates speak. In the US in early 2016, for example, way more people came out to see Bernie Sanders than Hillary Clinton. But Clinton still won – just as the polls said she would. Polls, for all their faults, are still the best measure we have before election day.
– Abagond, 2016.
Sources: mainly FiveThirtyEight (2016).
See also:
- FiveThirtyEight ratings of pollsters
- Nate Silver
- 2016 election for US president
- Jacob Bronowski: Knowledge or Certainty – has a bit on Gauss and the uncertainty of measurement.
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Another piece of criteria pollsters use are registered voters verses likely voters.
Two polls just came out, one by CNN and one by NBC.
In their four way totals CNN had Clinton at 43, Trump at 45, Johnson at 7 and Stien at 2.
In NBC poll Clinton was at 41, Trump at 37, Johnson at 12 and Stien at 4.
CNN polled likely voters which meant NOT pollimg people between the ages of 18 and 34. NBC polled registered voters thus the higher numbers for the third party canidates. Both Johnson and Stien do best with under 30 voters as well as independents.
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A very rational and professional post on polls and polling as part of the american poltical process in general and the presidential race in particular.
interesting how the word race is used ,
1.as a non scientific way to categorize human phenotypic diversity.
2.any competition of speed amongst animals,people and people’s machines.
3.any poltical competion to old a office or position of governance and athority.
“The Bradley Effect is where people lie to pollsters so as not to seem racist. It seems that was true in the 1980s and 1990s, but not since.”
really why? – although I will be googling to find a answer/explaination.
“Note that some polls are fake!”
which ones? in what context or due to what motive?
“For US elections, Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight keep a running average of polls.”
some like nice professional independent auditing and fact checking.
this said I still find the poltical process in general and the presidential “race” in particular to be extremely irrelavent to my life and proably to many if not most other people as well.
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New Quinnipiac Poll shows Johnson beating Trump among 18 to 34 year olds at 29% with 13% overall.
Stien is at 4% with 72% of voters not familiar with her compared with 54% not familiar with Johnson.
I belive there is a direct relationship between how much the media covers you and how well you do in the polls. I read some where that for every 1000 plus minutes of coverage the mainstream media gives to Trump and Clinton that breaks down to nine seconds of coverage for Johnson and three seconds of coverage for Stien.
Trump has 19% non white compared to Johnson 16% non white. Most of the 16% non white support Johnson has is the Hispanic vote because of his strong pro immigration platform.
There are two other polls showing that 60% of voters would like the third parties to be included in the debates. The Debate Commission has set a 15% minimum in five specific polls (USA today, NBC, Fox, CBS and CNN) but it doesn’t look like Johnson will be able to make that threshold.
https://www.qu.edu/news-and-events/quinnipiac-university-poll/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2378
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The polls don’t look good for Hillary and the lead she had coming out of the convention has vanished. Her poll numbers with millianials is weak.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/14/hillary-clinton-is-only-up-2-points-on-gary-johnson-with-young-voters-in-a-new-poll/
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Clinton poll numbers drop severely for voters between 18 and 34.
Clinton loses 16 points when the question included all four candidates and Trump losing only 5. In the poll, Clinton loses 24 points of support to Trump’s 8. She’s essentially tied with Trump and Johnson with younger voters.
“Quinnipiac used a likely voter pool in August and its new survey. But there are other important slides for Clinton in Quinnipiac’s poll. Up 21 with women in August, she now leads by only 12. She’s gone from trailing by 1 percentage point among independents to trailing by 9. Among nonwhite voters, Clinton has gone from a 56-point lead to a lead of 39 points.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/14/hillary-clinton-is-only-up-2-points-on-gary-johnson-with-young-voters-in-a-new-poll/
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One sponsor of the presidential debates, Philips Electric, has pulled out because of intense lobbying by the Libertarian Party.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/09/philips-pulls-presidential-debate-sponsorship-137053
“Philips “has a long and proud heritage of being non-partisan in the many countries it serves around the world. While the Commission on Presidential Debates is a non-partisan organization, their work may appear to support bi-partisan politics,” Stephenson said in a written statement. “We respect all points of view and, as a result, want to ensure that Philips doesn’t provide even the slightest appearance of supporting partisan politics. As such, no company funds have been or will be used to support the Commission on Presidential Debates.”
The Libertarian Parties puppet army of angry millianials have now turned there attention to Anheuser-Bush, one of the largest sponsors, to get them to pull out as well.
One thing sponsors don’t like is controversy .
Read more: http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/09/philips-pulls-presidential-debate-sponsorship-137053#ixzz4KfnJ6PQp
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook
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Lee Camp of Redacted Tonight talks about the different ways pollsters manufacture consent by the way they phrase poll questions as well as by which groups they select for their surveys.
It has come to the point where objective reporting of news in America happens through comedy because corperate news spins the establishment narrative.
(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OsJOO01UQLo&sns=fb)
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I just noticed that the above article I posted is an old Politico story from 2012 about Phillips Electronics pulling out of the presidential debates. Their is however an active movement this year to lobby both Anheuser-Bush and Southwest Airlines to pull their sponsorship of the debates.
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