Where Do Polls Come From?

During this past election we were bombarded by numbers from the latest polls. Every news channel was quoting some poll or another. CNN had it’s poll, FOX had it’s own too. Some of the news shows quoted polls like the Gallup or the Wall Street Journal Polls. I started to wonder “Where do polls come from?” This question was probably as mystifying to me as “Where did baby brother junior come from?” (and how can I send him back?) to little 3 year old (and up until then, only child) Pollyanna. I really had no idea.

This led to other questions like “How do I find a poll and get to vote, too?”, also “People must get payed to create polls?” (but how much…I bet you could get payed lots of money if you know how to tickle the poll results one way or another). People who create polls are apparently called Pollsters. A rather cute sounding name for someone who routinely has people on the edge of their seats, believing every word. Pretty powerful people these Pollsters.

“How are they created?” I wondered and  “Are polls honest and how can we tell?” “How accurate are they and should we believe them?” I didn’t get all these questions answered, but I tried to understand what I could.

What ended up happening I began to get deeper into the subject, I found more things I wanted explained like: Entrance Polls and Exit Polls. I also found out about something I had never even heard of called Push Polls (I’ll get to that in a minute).

I also found out about a strange title “Republican Pollster”. Neil Newhouse is purported to be one of the country’s leading Republican pollsters and he’s often quoted. Hmmmm…wonder how he introduces himself…
(Lower voice to as deep a baritone as you can manage…try channelling Denny Crain from Boston Legal)

(LOUDLY): “THE NAME’S NEIL NEWHOUSE, REPUBLICAN POLLSTER!, what do you do for a living?”

I supposed there must be Democratic Pollsters, too. And does this mean they only work for one party or the other or just that they are kindly giving us the heads up as to which way they tickle their numbers? Are there other kinds of people with this cute job title? Like a Born Again Christian Pollster or a Pro Choice Pollster?

When I first started digging, I lucked into this article about polls in the LA Times. Below are a few excerpts, I’ve included the link. If you want to know more, it’s worth the read.

How political polls work — and why they can differ so much

By Mark Barabak at the LA Times, Oct. 2008 <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/31/nation/na-pollqa31

“Opinion surveys [polls] are based on statistical probabilities. The idea is that by interviewing a representative sample of voters, pollsters will achieve the same result as if they had interviewed every voter in a given area.”

“Though some are skeptical of that fundamental premise, the pioneering George Gallup had a ready retort: “An accurate blood test requires only a few drops of blood.” In other words, a pollster can attain a reasonably accurate gauge of how 100 million or more Americans will behave on election day by conducting a scientific sampling of about 1,200 or so voters.”

“But there are any number of reasons that polls come up with varying results. Sometimes questions are worded differently, or posed in a different order. There are also different ways of choosing whom to sample. Some polls, such as the Los Angeles Times Poll, will talk to individuals at random. Others work off lists of registered voters.”

“The age, gender or ethnicity of the person asking the questions can affect the response. For that reason, some pollsters employ interactive technology, using a recorded voice or the Web. Others, however, frown at the practice because there is no way to know whether the respondent is a voter or their 6-year-old child. Any and all of those factors can cause results to differ…”

Many news sites run a continuos sample of political surveys, including one of the most popular polling sites:Pollster.com. There’s also RealClearPolitics.com, 538.com, The Wall Street Journal Polls and the website at gallup.com which also has this neat thing called the Daily Gallup which polls all kinds of things. The link I’ve included tells you all about Gallup which has been around since 1935. The About Gallup page has a strangely warm and fuzzy tone to it…I don’t know if I am comforted by it or if that’s what the Gallup company wants you to feel. The thought makes me feel strangely uneasy. I also found a FAQ page, which surprizingly had a lot of good info on it. I urge you to check it out. Gallup – FAQ page The page and it’s subsequent link to an explanation about how polls work was very interesting. Apparently most of us believe poll results, just not in the science of  how they are conducted and analyzed. [I am not even going to comment on that. I have a sneaking suspicion I am one of those people] On the FAQ’s pages I discovered  that because of increasing cell phone only use households (as apposed to the traditional land line all homes used to have) Gallup is now including polls conducted on cell phones. How do they get your number and how come they can have it? I thought there was a rule about accessing cell phone numbers. Hmmmm.

PUSH POLLS:

Now let’s get to this thing I mentioned earlier called Push Polls. I got this except from an article I found on politco.com

Think You’ve Been Push Polled’? Maybe not Politico.com: Push Polls

By: (The famed Republican Pollster) Neil Newhouse

“Push polls are generally very short — no longer than three or four questions, usually lasting less than one minute on the phone.”

“So if you think you’ve been push polled, ask yourself these three easy questions:

• Was I on the phone for more than three or four minutes?

• Did the caller ask me my age or party affiliation?

• Did the caller ask me more than five or six questions?”

“If the answer to these questions is yes, then in all likelihood you have not been push polled. Just polled.”

Exit Polls and Others:

I wanted to know a bit more about the other kinds of polls I’d learned about and I got this info from Wikipedia. Wikipedia – Exit Poll etc.

“An exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. Unlike an opinion poll (i.e. the Gallup or the Wall Street Journal Polls), which ask whom the voter plans to vote for or some similar formulation, an exit poll asks whom the voter actually voted for. A similar poll conducted before actual voters have voted is called an entrance poll. Pollsters – usually private companies working for newspapers or broadcasters (TV and radio) – conduct exit polls to gain an early indication as to how an election has turned out, as in many elections the actual result may take hours or even days to count…”

“Exit polls have historically and throughout the world been used as a check against and rough indicator of the degree of election fraud…”

“Widespread criticism of exit polling has occurred in cases, especially in the U.S. where exit poll results have appeared and/or have provided a basis for projecting winners before all real polls have closed. It has been feared that announcing the results of exit polls too early has possibly influenced election results. Apparently, during the 1980 U.S. presidential election NBC predicted a victory for Ronald Reagan at 8:15 pm EST, based on exit polls of 20,000 voters. It was 5:15 pm on the West Coast, and the polls were still open. There was speculation that voters stayed away after hearing the results. Afterward television networks voluntarily decided not to project the presidential victor until after polls closed in the West, Hawaii and Alaska excluded. In the 2000 U.S. presidential election,  it has been alleged that media organizations released exit poll results for Florida before the polls actually closed in Florida.”

“In some countries, early release of Exit polls is a crime  and some countries these types of polls have been banned altogether.

I researched exit poll companies, Edison/Mitofsky is one of the biggest and has been around since 1996. I got the information about them from their website, so consider the source. According to the website, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC and the Associated Press used Edison to conduct Exit Polls and collect vote returns in their broadcasts for the 2004, 2006 and 2008 U.S. presidential elections. I took this quote directly form the site becasue I found it curious and it led to another question:

“Edison is unique in its ability to conduct complex Exit Poll-based research projects in all 50 states, in a wide variety of settings.”

Does this claim mean that other exit poll companies only have the ability to cover say, 25 of the states during elections and if so who was driving the boat during prior elections? Maybe we didn’t have exit polling back then, or maybe it wasn’t as accurate. Hmmmm.

Apparently if you are in the exit polls business, elections are not the only places you canvas, after all you’d go broke if that’s all you covered. Polls are conducted outside retail stores, movie theaters, concert venues, airports, train stations, buses, cruise ship docks, golf courses, baseball stadiums and basketball arenas. They also do survey research for radio stations, television stations, Internet companies, newspapers, cable networks, record labels and other media organizations. Edison says it has conducted 14 major national studies in conjunction with the Arbitron Company on the role of the Internet in today’s media world and that the results are often quoted in Business Week, Advertising Age, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The company says it works with many of the largest radio ownership groups in the U. S. such as Bonneville, Entercom, CBS Radio, Westwood One, Radio One and ABC Radio as well as radio stations in Argentina, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland and the UK.

All that information. They say “knowledge is power” and if “they” are to be believed, “power is money”. Makes you wonder.

I still don’t understand how you get into the political Gallup Polls. This election was so important to me that I guess I just wanted to vote twice, once in the election and just once, I wanted to be apart of the excitement of the nightly news poll numbers before the election and I thought you might have too.

Just a thought I caught flying by….what do you think?

~ by veritas07 on November 29, 2008.