Political pollsters have always tried to replicate the relevant population, conducting extra interviews if necessary or weighting overrepresented respondents’ responses down and underrepresented respondents’ responses up.
This is pretty technical stuff, unless you’re familiar with phrases like "multilevel regression with post-stratification," but Morris’s prose is reasonably clear. The guts of Strength in Numbers is Morris’s chapter on how media and Democratic pollsters have moved toward online interviewing and sophisticated computer weighting of the results. For a time poll results seemed reasonably in line with how people voted. Absentee and mail-in voting became increasingly common-universal in Oregon, for example. Exit polls, conducted at polling places, routinely oversampled Democrats-most often, as found by Mitofsky (whose work I observed closely in Mexico and Russia as well as the United States), when the interviewers were female graduate students.
Response rates-the percentage of attempted interviews that were completed-fell below 10 percent. By the 1980s, as Morris notes, phones were universal, and random digit dialing, invented by CBS pollster Warren Mitofsky, insured acceptably random samples.īy the late 2000s, however, we no longer lived in a country with universal landline telephones and a population that answered the phone. But telephone interviews were quicker and (if you could buy time on a mainframe computer) results more easily tabulated. And they had to stop interviewing well before Election Day, because results had to be mailed in and cross-tabulated by hand.īy the time I got into the polling business, with the Democratic pollster Peter Hart in 1974, we still preferred in-person interviews because you could ask more complex questions. Gallup had to use in-person interviewers for at least two decades after his first random sample poll in October 1935, because many Americans had party lines (people Morris’s age might have to Google that one) or didn’t have phones at all. But election polling, then and now, has operated within constraints imposed by time and money. Any pollster today would keep on polling. In that case Gallup’s last interview was conducted on October 25 and showed Dewey with a 5 point lead, less than in earlier polls. But he’s surely aware George Gallup’s claims to predict elections, based on his numbers in just three elections (1936, 1940, 1944), undermined his and other pollsters’ reputations after Dewey didn’t defeat Truman in 1948. His primary focus is on something he says polls don’t reliably do, or maybe shouldn’t-predict election results. It’s not likely he’s talking about teachers’ unions, foundations backing liberal criminal justice procedures, or Joe Biden. Morris leaves little doubt in which direction his interpretations would bend when he describes "interest groups, lobbyists funded by dark money, demagogic politicians" as the greatest current threats to our political system. But issue poll results can vary widely depending on question wording and question order, and the same results can support quite different conclusions from different analysts. Of course we’d have less information about public opinion without issue polls more is better than less.
On that last point Morris is on high ground, but he doesn’t spend much time surveying the terrain. But he insists that polls "are still the best tools we have to gauge support for the actions of the government." Despite his liberal views, he admits that "polls have routinely underestimated the attitudes of conservative Americans over the last twenty years," and that "pre-election polls face severe and prolonged threats from partisan nonresponse." They were off the mark in 2016, he says, and even more so in 2020. Like most people in his line of work, he admits there are some problems with polling these days.
In 2017 he was a junior at the University of Texas and by 2020 became a data journalist for The Economist. Elliott Morris in Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them. Are they right? Have the polls deteriorated? Are the polls broken? Probably most Americans, or at least those paying attention, have been thinking so since Donald Trump surprised just about everyone by getting elected president in 2016.
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