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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Political polls proliferate in an election year, and junkies just can't get enough -- but not all surveys are created equal. Salon rates the pollsters.
Aug 7, 2004 | For the Democrats, there was Boston. And for the media, there was another B-word. From USA Today to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, journalists buzzed last week about whether John Kerry got enough of a "bounce" in the polls from his nominating convention. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times collectively spent 10,735 words over two weeks on a shift of a few percentage points -- about twice as many words as Kerry's hour-long acceptance speech.
Polling frenzy is not restricted to convention-week surveys, of course. Every major American news network and newspaper has some kind of polling outfit in-house. And as the November election nears, Americans will get hit with the TV networks' daily reporting of the three-day rolling averages known as tracking polls. Rasmussen Reports, a smaller polling firm, is already running tracking polls in battleground states. "It's so they can have a new story every day," says Robert Blendon, who teaches political polling at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
While it may seem like overkill, Americans crave coverage of the peaks and valleys of political polling, according to a recent study in the Journal of Politics. In fact, Americans prefer reporting on which politician is ahead and why to harder news coverage and even scandal stories -- conventionally considered the bread and butter of modern news organizations. Demand for quick numbers has also propped up a budding cottage industry of smaller firms, such as Rasmussen Reports and SurveyUSA, that sometimes use unconventional methods.
In such a close election, the politics of polling has higher stakes, and the campaigns don't let an unfavorable poll get reported without a fight. In June, the Los Angeles Times released a poll showing Bush behind by seven points, and Bush-Cheney campaign pollster Matthew Dowd went into attack mode. Dowd sent a warning to ABC News: "A note of caution: be very careful in reporting Los Angeles Times poll. It is a mess. Bush is leading independents by three, ahead among Republicans by a larger margin than Kerry is ahead among Dems, and we are down by seven. Outrageous. And it gets worse. They have Dems leading generic congressional ballot by 19. This means this poll is too Democratic by 10 to 12 points."
ABC News reported the poll anyway, but ABC's political unit posted Dowd's objections in its online weblog, The Note. The Los Angeles Times' poll czar, Susan Pinkus, shot back in a scathing and technical response to ABC:
"I feel that I have to respond to [Dowd's] assertion that the poll is a 'mess.' His negative spin of this poll is, quite truthfully, not unexpected. The Times makes every effort to use sound methodological techniques that are used by most reputable research and polling organizations ... The Times does RDD (random digit dialing) sampling which reaches households with listed and unlisted telephone numbers. The poll weights slightly (for minor corrections) based on census data for sex, race, age and education and does not weight for party ID. Party ID is a moving variable that changes from one election to another, and weighting by party registration makes no sense nationally because many states don't have their voters register by party and some states don't have voters register to vote until the day of the election."
