Essay on Polling America

In the New York Times article “What’s the Matter With Polling?” public policy and political science professor Cliff Zukin argues that polls and pollsters have grown to be unreliable due to the growth of cellphones and the decline in people willing to answer surveys. Since a higher percentage of people have acquired and use cellphones more than landlines in the past decade and the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act has been interpreted to prohibit the calling of cellphones through automatic dialers, survey companies have to devote more money, time, and resources to contacting potential participants. The rapidly declining response rate has also increased the risk of surveys failing to reflect public opinion, and therefore increase the number of failed predictions. Although conducting polls on the Internet is cheaper, “coverage error” is prominent, and Internet use correlates inversely with age and voting habits, making it even more difficult to predict the outcome of elections. Beyond this, as Zukin illustrates, it is nearly impossible to figure out how to draw a representative sample of Internet users.

Oftentimes these polls can be too heavily relied upon when attempting to determine who will be our next President of the United States, even if they are said to be based on the current opinion of the American public. An example that proves my statement is the case of the 1948 Presidential Election, where Harry Truman became our 33rd President of the United States over Thomas E. Dewey despite the fact that public opinion polls at the time predicted that Dewey would crush Truman in the election. More recent examples include, according to an article on the website usnews.com, “In 2012, his own campaign's polls, among others, predicted Mitt Romney, the Republicans' nominee, would defeat President Barack Obama for the presidency, but just barely.

A type of poll that is commonly use throughout the service of U.S presidents is the Presidental job approval rating. This poll is designed to measure how well the public thinks the president is doing his or job.

Conducting national exit polls is an enormous undertaking, requiring as long as two years to implement. The goal of the process is to collect information on a subset of voters that can be projected to the entire active electorate with a high degree of confidence. Numerous obstacles, though, stand in the way, threatening to undermine the effort and bias the results. Exit polls, like most surveys, unfold in four distinct but often overlapping stages / Research-ers usually begin by developing procedures for drawing a probabilistic sample of voters whose responses can be inferred to the active electorate with a high degree of confidence. They develop a questionnaire, capable of both describing the types of voters participating in an election as well as offering insights into the reasoning behind their choices. Interviewers are trained and eventually employed to disseminate the questionnaires to and collect them from sampled voters on Election Day. The process concludes with the integration of voters’ responses into a data set for analysis. The specific procedures used for each stage vary by polling organization; therefore, I focus my discussion on those procedures developed by Warren Mitofsky, Murray Edelman, and their col¬leagues at CBS and used by the polling units employed by the network consortium to conduct the national exit polls.

The public-opinion poll is the most common way research her’s measure public opinion today. The poll taker asks a question to a sample group. This sample group is a small number of people that represent the entire population you want to ask the question to. For example, if the pollster wants to know “What do college students think of the American National Government class?” it would not be possible to ask all college students in the country so the pollster would ask 1000 students from a variety of different schools across the country the question. Then take the percent of total the number of students (of the 1000) that Love this class and call that the national percent that love this class. If 990 students loved the class then 99% nationally love this class.

Elections fascinate me and polling intrigues me even more. What does a pollster do to reach a scientifically backed conclusion? How does a pollster adjust his sample to adhere to demographics? These questions keep my head running almost 24/7, even after the election. This election cycle, the LATimes/USC Dornsife poll reached prominence by supplying the first nationwide daily tracking poll. At first, I was confused when I saw the poll. It appeared to be an outlier. “How come every other poll is showing Clinton winning but this one isn’t” is a question that frequently floated in my head. To answer my question, I decided to take a deeper glance into the poll’s methodologies. When I discovered the poll’s tracking nature, I immediately noticed its

The polling method and sample size arguments are well thought out and certainly supported by the outside references you provided. The polling method can definitely lead to numbers being skewed due to several factors that are determined by the person or group performing the poll. The sample size can also impact the outcome of the poll based on the way the sample population is selected. The size of the sample population will lead to a larger swing in the mean numbers if the sample population is smaller. The swing in the mean result could lead to a lower confidence margin.

I agree that information on the ones that conducts the polls is important. Insight into the people that conducted the polls may explain the direction of the results reported. The results can sometimes be bias and not truly represent the population that was sampled. The reporter of the results may speak louder than the results themselves. You also make a valid point in regards to the funding of the polls. The people funding the polls may have an influence on the results also.

In the 2012 United States presidential election, many pre-election polls believed that Mitt Romney would win, even by just a small margin. However, Barack Obama won the election easily, with a win by about five million votes (The Week Staff). Obama’s victory upset many Americans, mainly the Republican party and those supporting it. A few factors came into play that made polling inconsistent and incorrect in this election. The growth of cell phones caused automatic calling to fail to reach many people. Also, the decrease in response rate caused less accurate polls for representing a whole. However, some methods may help combat these issues, such as calling more. Polling became less accurate in these recent times, due to the increase in cell

It is pretty obvious that margin of error decreases as sample size increases. According to an article I read, with a sample of about 50, which was the requirement for this assignment, the margin of error is around 14%. Our poll received a little over 50 responses so I think it is safe to say that is was relatively accurate due to a low margin of error. However, it is nowhere near accurate enough because 14% can be quite large in the world of polling. With our particular poll being about Ohio, which hosts nine million people, an accurate depiction would need at least 200 responses. Fifty-nine responses is enough to measure, but this particular poll is not an accurate depiction of the population I wanted to sample. Mainly, this is because

All of these polls must be fair and unbiased in order to be an accurate and valid data. The definition of fair poll is a question without any hint of personal opinions or judgements. A poll must also be unbiased, meaning not supporting or opposing a particular person or thing in an unfair way, because of personal opinions to influence your judgements. There are several different types of bias however the main ones are; analytical bias, cognitive bias, confounding bias, consistency bias, experimenter bias, omitted-variable bias, recency bias, reporting bias, selection bias and systematic bias. Firstly analytical bias arises due to the way that the results are evaluated. Secondly cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment, whereby inferences about

The election polls I trust must have a proven track record. We all recognize what is happening daily, that either encourages or discourages voters. The media is capable of reporting false information, it happens daily. The media reports a story centered toward the viewer, the goal of the media is to encourage individuals to view their story. Therefore we all must be careful when the media is present. Election polls that are centered around the media do not guarantee the voter the polls are correct. One must identify the election polls' track record. If the track record has been proven and has provided an accurate collection of data for many years (Election polling, 2015). Then one has provided an essential proven track record.

The three things that affect the margin of error are sample size, the type of sampling done, and the size of the population. When a poll results indicates that one candidate has 54% of the voters with a margin of error 3%, I need to know more than just the margin of error. I need to know when the poll was taken, what was the sampling size, who did the samples, and how were they collected. For example with the upcoming election that is going on now, it shows that Donald Trump is leading the polls for the Republicans. They failed to show what group of people voted for him and what states are conducting this poll. The polls aren’t correct, because not all people have gotten out to vote.

Polls are not a representation of numbers don’t lie because polls are not an unbiased source of information backed by raw statistics and evidence. Polls are conducted by surveying people in an area “randomly” (which at times is not true and has been rigged in history before) and asking people. As stated earlier people lie therefore right there Polls are not a representation of the quote but let’s continue the poll only is done in areas however people in one area may have different view from another area therefore it’s not a true representation of the whole therefore it is not an accurate number, but let’s continue Polls fluctuate there were times Donald trump was not number one and on the premise that numbers have to be unchanging the argument is again nullified I could go on but I am going to stop there. On to Micro’s counter unemployment rate(of January) the unemployment rate is 100% accurate under the definition that it is biased off of people in the work force now a PERSON can skew that to sound however they want but that number is a perfect representation biased off of unbiased data and the parameters of the

When seeking to determine additional information needed to know from the pollster, mainly my first task would be to inquire which hypothesis test technique was utilized. Moreover, once that was known and established and the correct hypothesis test was used then it would be much easier to analyze the results. Furthermore, it is essential to determine and know the direction of the test to use such as would we utilize a two-tailed test, an upper-tailed test, or a lower-tailed test (Mirabella, 2011).