Our Polls Are on the Mark. I Think.

Washington Post by Jon Cohen | Nov. 2, 2008 (Opinion)

January, you may recall, was a rough month for the pollsters. All the polls showed Sen. Barack Obama poised to follow up his big win in the Iowa caucuses with a knockout blow to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the New Hampshire primary. But he lost, sending the 13 firms that did public pre-election polls there scrambling for explanations.

Could polling be similarly embarrassed this month, misjudging the last chapter of this epic presidential ... Full Story »

Posted by Fabrice Florin

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Fabrice Florin
4.0
 by Fabrice Florin - Nov. 1, 2008

Interesting opinion piece by the Washington Post's polling director about whether the current election polls are right or wrong. The author offers an insightful and well-reasoned analysis, based on extensive factual evidence from multiple sources, to help us understand the strengths and weaknesses of today's polls. It concludes with a sense of confidence that Obama is ahead, by correlating polling data with reasonable evidence from other methodologies, such as predictive models and on-the-ground shoe-leather reporting.

I enjoyed learning about the pre-election "bandwagon effect" -- which frequently overstates support for the winner.

The polls appear to be in general agreement that Obama is ahead; the only question is by how much. And this time, the pollsters’ findings are being reinforced by the work of two other groups of campaign obsessives: the political scientists who use predictive models drawn from past election results to predict the next one (the one professor whose forecast had McCain headed for victory has “adjusted” his model), and the reporters out there knocking on doors and interviewing voters.

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