Public Opinion Polling

How Public Opinion is Measured (and Mismeasured)

Rise of Polling Companies

• Originated with market research– Gallup dissertation

• Early Political Polling– Election forecasting

– Literary Digest polls• Correctly predicted winner of presidential elections

from 1916 to 1932• Conducted VERY large mail-in surveys (drawn

from telephone and automobile ownership rolls)

Rise of the Gallup Poll

• 1936 Election– Literary Digest vs. Gallup

• Gallup predicted not only that he would get it right with a sample of approximately 1,500 respondents (as opposed to over 10 million), but that Literary Digest would get it wrong

• Gallup used quota sampling methods and face-to-face interviews

Polling Techniques

• Literary Digest to the Representative Sample– Mail-in surveys to face-to-face interviews– We can now get accurate public opinion data from as

few as 1,500 respondents (under right conditions)

• Polling techniques have changed as technology has advanced– Face-to-face interviews to telephone surveys

• Telephone databases

– Early telephone surveys to sophisticated telephone polling (automated systems)

Future Polling Techniques?

• Internet polling– Today, internet polling is very unscientific

• Self-Selection Bias– Impossible to get random sample of population

– For that matter, any call-in TV poll is also unscientific and worthless

– In order for internet polling to become a valid method for measuring public opinion, pollsters would need to find ways of generating a random sample of the population

• Particularly difficult given that internet users as a whole are a specific segment of electorate/citizenry

Use of Polls in Politics:Dewey Defeats Truman

• 1948 Election– Gallup predicted that

Republican Thomas Dewey would defeat incumbent president Harry Truman

– Gallup, Roper, Crossley stopped polling about a week before general election

• Still many undecided voters

Use of Polls in Politics:Confidence in Polling Restored

• Louis Harris– John Kennedy hired Harris to be his campaign

pollster• Humphrey was vulnerable in West Virginia and

Wisconsin• Harris was the first pollster to be employed by a

president– Kennedy kept him on to gauge public approval ratings

and policy preferences

Use of Polls in Politics

• Johnson– Used polling data to measure public support for his domestic

agenda– Especially concentrated on public opinion late in his presidency,

as he was extremely concerned with perception of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

– In 1966, Johnson’s nightly reading included summarized results of a series of questions relating to public support for the war.

• Nixon– In his first year in office, Nixon commissioned more private polls

than Johnson commissioned during his entire presidency– Extensive polling during 1972 re-election campaign

Use of Polls in Politics

• Ford– Examined strategies for maneuvering out of the

political hole left by the Watergate scandal• Tried to gauge public opinion about the possibility of

pardoning Nixon

• Carter– Felt that public opinion was so important that he gave

his pollster an office in the White House • The beginning of a much more common trend among recent

presidents• Hostage crisis at end of his presidency consumed much of

his time and polling attention

Use of Polls in Politics

• Reagan– Met with his pollster almost monthly to monitor public support for

the administration and its policies • George H.W. Bush

– Kept close tallies on public opinion and reportedly relied on poll results to shape his posture with respect to Iraq.

• Clinton– “Horserace presidency”– Made no secret about the role of pollsters in his White House,

commissioning regular polls about every aspect of American political life (Stanley Greenburg and later from Dick Morris)

– Morris – Clinton did not used polls to select his policies• Used polls to determine which actions were winning the most

support and to shape public messages

Use of Polls in Politics

• 2000 Election– Methods for polling today are extremely

accurate– Enormous number of polling companies, even

larger number of polls• Large polling companies (Gallup, etc.)• Polling alliances

– On average, these polls were extremely accurate (missed by about one percentage point)