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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Bush leads by 10 points. No, wait, Kerry's up by 5. No, Nader's on top! OK -- that's not true, but in the ever crazier world of election polls, who knows what's next?
Oct 6, 2004 | On Sept. 17, the Gallup Organization, the polling industry's oldest and most respected firm, released a survey devastating to the prospects of John Kerry's campaign for the presidency. After interviewing more than a thousand people, the company determined that Americans "likely" to vote in November preferred George W. Bush to Kerry by a 13-point margin -- 55 percent to 42 percent.
Bush's lead in the poll marked "the first statistically significant edge either candidate has held this year," reported USA Today, which, along with CNN, is one of the main media sponsors of the Gallup Poll. The paper added: "The boost Bush received from the Republican convention has increased rather than dissipated, reshaping a race that for months has been nearly tied."
At the time, a number of other polls were suggesting a much closer race, though all gave Bush a lead among likely voters: A survey by the firm ICR had him up by 8 percent, one by the New Democrat Network showed Bush ahead by 5, and Democracy Corps, the political strategy organization run by a group of former Clinton strategists, put Bush's lead at just 1 percent.
Left-wing bloggers immediately suspected something was amiss with Gallup's apparently aberrant results, and one of them, Steve Soto of the Left Coaster, asked Gallup's representatives for a more detailed explanation of what kinds of voters Gallup considered "likely" to go to the polls on Election Day. Gallup courteously sent Soto a reply, one that convinced him, and Democrats all over the Web, that the firm's polls were rigged.
Gallup's survey, it turned out, included a large number of Republicans -- about 40 percent of the people polled identified themselves as being in the GOP, a number far higher than the Republican share of voters in recent presidential elections. Of course Gallup's poll was showing a huge Bush win, Democrats cried -- the company was calling too many Republicans! The brewing lefty anger at Gallup hit a fever pitch on Thursday, when MoveOn.org, the liberal advocacy group, purchased a full-page ad in the New York Times denouncing Gallup's methodology. "Why does America's top pollster keep getting it wrong?" the ad asked in bazillion-point type. It also noted that George Gallup Jr., the son of the Gallup Organization's founder and a longtime executive of the firm, is "a devout evangelical Christian." MoveOn didn't specify why that was important, but the implication was clear: Gallup is on George W. Bush's side in this election.
Is Gallup's poll pulling for Bush? The short answer is no; polling experts, even Democratic polling experts, consider Gallup transcendently nonpartisan, one of the survey industry's straightest shooters. Several pollsters say they resent MoveOn's attack on Gallup. But there's a more important side to the kerfuffle over the Gallup Poll, one that lays bare not only legitimate questions over Gallup's methodology but also, more generally, the possible shortcomings of all election polls as well as the mistakes the public and the media make in interpreting them. In addition, there are many reasons, these days, to be broadly suspicious of the truth according to pollsters. Not the least of them is that an increasingly large share of the population fails to respond to pollsters' calls (a phenomenon that may be responsible for Gallup's odd Sept. 17 poll results) and are possibly evading surveyors altogether by using cellphones and caller I.D. systems. In a tight race, these concerns are more consequential; and the polling industry sees no good way around the problems in the long run.
We live, today, in an era of polling ubiquity. In the 2004 election, we'll probably have more polls from more organizations over more topics than we've ever had before, and the public will enjoy far greater access to these polls than in the past. The many polls dictate media coverage and campaign strategy, determining from week to week and day to day how journalists and insiders call the race -- not only who's up and who's down but why, how, where and what they should do about it.
Indeed, right now, a new Gallup Poll, released Sunday, shows the presidential race tied, with Bush and Kerry at 49 percent among likely voters. Other polls this week variously show Kerry leading, Bush leading, or neither. What should you make of those numbers? Perhaps the best thing to do is resist their pull.
