The Pros And Cons Of Election Polling

While the majority claim that taking a step to deport people is cruel and inconsistent with our legal value that undocumented immigrant strengthen our economy and country. Claim-makers use the polls because they offer feedback at the early stages in the process and to determine whether their claim is effective or not. Policymakers often base their decision on what the polls say. Public opinion overall there is little support to deport all those undocumented immigrants in the U.S. nonetheless survey in the past have found great support for building a barrier along the Mexican border and change the constitution. This form of public- opinion is often viewed as inaccurate because polls are formalized situation in which people know they are being solicited for analysis and this can affect what they are willing to

A vast amount of public opinion polling takes place during election cycles. These polls are studied by evaluating a sample of a population. Pollsters aim to study random sample of the population to gain a true understand of the public opinion. Unfortunately, pollsters often run into what is known as a sample bias. This is when a sample does not represent the public true opinion. Instead in sample bias only a fragment of the opinions is present. Though polls are subject to error, they do have the ability to echo the sentiments of the population. I believe this is both most effective and prevalent in exit polls. The important of exit polls as highlighted in the article “Exit polls and voter turnout” by Asger Lau Anderson and Thomas Jensen. In the article the authors suggest that exit polls drive voters to get involved. They state that “In relation to the debate on the implications of exit polls, the most important insight from our analysis is the following. It may well happen that the incentive to vote increases after the revelation of an exit poll.” By suggesting this, the authors relay the idea that exit polls are the way to truly gain an understanding of the public opinion.

Public opinion polls come in a wide-set of different subjects and are good examples of inductive arguments that are seen and used in our day to day lives to measure the public’s views regarding a particular topic or topics done so by taking a non-biased survey/questions. This is an excellent example of inductive arguments, because the person or party/entity conducting these surveys, is looking to validate their argument and assumptions, or to provide a guarantee of truth in the concluding result. However, it is not simply easy to rely on “experts” and believe that the data from these polls they collect, are completely accurate and are not skewed from their own biases. Since a survey is an inductive generalization, a sample is taken from the target population from which a conclusion is drawn regarding the entire population.Which makes these inductive arguments fall into two categories: either weak or strong.

In the article “The Myth of the Vanishing Voter” by Michael P. McDonald and Samuel L. Popkin, it is argued that the decline in voter participation in national elections since 1972 is an illusion created by the Bureau of the Census because it uses the voting-age population to calculate voter turnout instead of calculating the population of citizens who are eligible to vote (2001, 963).

Campaigns in politics are important in determining outcomes and inform the voters who remain undecided. Also, campaigns matter because although the candidates or media officials may know what the outcome will be, the voters themselves do not (107). Aside from campaigns, conventions are also important, if not more important. Party nominating conventions affect the apathetic, uninterested electorates who think conventions are interesting and exciting, often known as the Olympic games of politics (121). This experience for voters can carry influence, and is a time of “intense political learning” (129). Therefore, aggregately, conventions make public opinion meaningful because the citizens who watch make an informed decision about a candidate, and have facts about why they will vote for that candidate. The chief reason why individual public opinion is meaningless during presidential elections is the “nonattitudes.” Nonattitudes are survey responses made up on the spot during an interview by a respondent who has no attitude on politics (113). Therefore, these individuals diminish the value of public opinion because we hate inconsistency and this creates an abundance of views on issues. However, during election night, exit polls support why aggregate opinion is also important. Exit polls are meaningful because one hundred percent of those leaving the polls have voted (102). Therefore, we can get real results from the electorates and this makes collective public opinion

Voter turnout is the rate by which people vote in elections. The simplest way to calculate a given election's turnout rate is to compare the actual number of voters with the voting-age population. “Voter turnout in the United States is among the worlds’ lowest.” (E.S. 371) The graph below taken from an article written for the Huffington Post in 2012, illustrates how poor United States voter turnout has been as compared to other industrialized nations. Our voter turnout

Undoubtedly, the last 80 years have brought the biggest change to the election process - polling. Beginning with the Gallup poll in 1936, the industry has become a titanic business, growing unregulated by the United States government. Frequently, polls have come under fire for their inaccuracy, or for their role in blocking the Democratic process (the 2000 and 2004 elections come to mind). Nonetheless, the 1992 election was not notable because of alleged bias, but because of what the polls said about

With looming elections, polls with independent samples were taken to obtain the following data concerning the number of people who favor two different major

The 2016 election has been the first election where social media has been a key player to how people got their information. Statistics say “44 percent of American adults said they had learned something new in the past week about the election from social media.” However, with social media such an important influence on the younger generation it is important for all of this information to be legitimate and truthful. Google and Facebook have recently changed their policies to try to stop fake news articles from popping up within their ad space. The spread of fake news articles skews the public's perception of the candidates. The guardian talks about how the American voter is not just one demographic (college educated individuals, white men, minorities etc. ) because of this lack of (straightforward), it's hard to get an accurate prediction on who would have won the election. Additionally, the media affected the election negatively because they did not give the general public enough information to understand the statistics that they were

The legacy and lessons of Truman’s whistle-stop campaign continue to be studied by political analysts, and politicians today often mimic his campaign methods by scheduling multiple visits to key states, as Truman did. He visited California, Illinois, and Ohio 48 times, compared with 6 visits to those states by Dewey. Political scientist Thomas M. Holbrook concludes that his strategic campaigning in those states and others gave Truman the electoral votes he needed to win (61, 65). The 1948 election also had an effect on pollsters, who, as Elmo Roper admitted, “couldn’t have been more wrong” (qtd. in Karabell 255). Life magazine’s editors concluded that pollsters as well as reporters and commentators were too convinced of a Dewey victory to analyze the polls seriously, especially the opinions of undecided voters (Karabell 256). Pollsters assumed that undecided voters would vote in the same proportion as decided voters — and that turned out to be a false assumption (Karabell 258). In fact, the lopsidedness of the polls might have led voters who supported Truman to call themselves undecided out of an unwillingness to associate themselves with the losing side, further skewing the polls’ results (McDonald, Glynn, Kim, and Ostman 152). Such errors led pollsters to change their methods significantly after the 1948 election. After the election, many political analysts, journalists, and historians concluded

Strong negative opinions often rise out of ignorance. Not this time. Pew also reported 85 percent of voters say they are “following the election closely.” Sixty percent say they are “more interested in politics than they were four years ago.”

As politics roar between foreign policy, presidential campaigning and for a while now the vacant seat from the late Anthony Scalia, we can see opinions from both parties for and against the filling of the seat for many reasons. As the US nation, wide spreads the presidential campaign, we see many viewpoints, drawing in from all over for the nominee pickings in November, with not a large choice in the presidential race we see much of the fighting rebelling against the vacant seat too. With politician's voice suggesting that the people have a choice of who fills the seat, while the president and congress have other thoughts, has created a large split between the houses, while the Supreme Court is equally split to figure out how to unequally figure

The title of the article is a little misleading because the polls that are misleading are the ones that need to “stop the polling insanity.” Will they? No. So, the point of the article is that it is up to the individual reading the polls to assess

No campaign in the history of presidential runnings has ever been the same. Yes, past campaigns and presidential candidates have shown their similarities between each other, but none has had the same events occur. The major variable is time. Society has shown a history of changing ideals and appeals. Each year, slowly but surely, society’s view is shaping and shifting. The presidential candidates know this factor and have to change with society to gain their social appeal. Within this time shift, we can analyze past polls and outcomes of primaries that have shown to be somewhat misleading.

This then leads into what is the sample size is too small and is not a great representation of the overall population. If the sample size is too small, it could lead to selection bias which is when the sample does a terrible job representing the actual ideologies of the population in that area. Push polling, which is asking questions in a way that gives the pollster the answer that is being sought out, is often another technique used to potentially skew the outcome. All of these are factors that could potentially be important when it comes to the outcome of the polls. Make sure to keep in mind that whenever a poll is taken there is always a way that someone/something can skew it to their