Pollsters sweat it out as Iowans prepare to vote
After a series of headline-making whiffs, did the pollsters get Trump right?
By Steven Shepard
01/30/16 07:47 AM EST
After months of campaigning and millions of dollars spent, it isn’t just the presidential candidates who face a reckoning starting on Monday night in Iowa – it’s also the pollsters.
The tallying of the first votes in the caucuses – combined with the more than two dozen other states that will vote in primaries or caucuses over the next six weeks – marks the first and perhaps most important test for election pollsters of the 2016 race after a string of high-profile struggles.
Those misses include the 2012 general election, when national polls showing a close race significantly underestimated President Barack Obama’s margin of victory, and 2014, when the polls undervalued Republican Senate and gubernatorial candidates – including even the GOP’s own internal polling.
Then, last year, pollsters overseas missed parliamentary elections in Israel and the United Kingdom. And, back on the home front, the handful of polls conducted before last November’s governor’s race in Kentucky failed to predict Republican Matt Bevin’s relatively easy victory over his Democratic opponent.
And after a pre-primary season that has been defined by an unanticipated front-runner touting a poll lead seen by political experts as extraordinary, the stakes for the industry are high.
“It’s certainly the time when our industry is in the crosshairs,” said Mollyann Brodie, the president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research Brodie. “It’s the time when people are paying most attention,” she said, conceding that “the failures bring a lot more attention than the successes.”
Political polling has been at a crossroads for the better part of a decade, as the old model of randomly calling voters over landline phones has been scuttled by Americans’ embrace of cell phones and their increasing refusal to participate in phone polls. As internet access expands to include the vast majority of Americans, some survey research has moved online – but internet pollsters still largely struggle to replicate the random selection of phone polls.
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/pollsters-sweat-it-out-as-iowans-prep-to-vote-218433#ixzz3yknmQ3jZ
