DRUDGE REPORT FLASH 2002�
Pollsters' Inaccuracy In 2002 Contests Worries Industry
Fri Nov 08 2002 10:16:15 ET
Just before Election Day, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a stunning poll about the governor's race in Illinois: GOP candidate Jim Ryan was ahead. The poll was conducted by nationally known pollster John Zogby. Zogby told the Post-Dispatch that he had personally reviewed the result and had affirmed its accuracy. Oops: forty-eight hours later, Mr. Ryan lost big after all. 'We blew it,' Mr. Zogby says now, the WALL STREET JOURNAL reported on Friday.
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And so, it appears, did many other political pollsters. The reasons may be as various as the recent popularity of caller ID and cellphones, which hamper efforts to reach voters, and the nation's increasing ethnic diversity, which makes it harder to get an accurate statistical sampling of the electorate." The Journal adds, "The GOP tilt of the midterm election surprised millions of Americans who had been following pre-election news coverage and commentary. Some survey results did reflect the late Republican surge, which was fueled by President Bush's campaigning.
But those that didn't underscored mounting problems faced by an industry that looms ever larger in U.S. politics as the number and use of polls proliferate. Mr. Zogby goes so far as to say that 'the industry is at a crossroads.'"
The Journal also reports, "Aside from statistical variation, pollsters face a range of problems stemming from the changing mood and makeup of the American electorate. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is declining cooperation from people who simply don't want to be bothered.
Many Americans use caller-ID telephone technology to screen out calls from survey takers. Others hang up in exasperation because they are tired of calls from telemarketers. . The country's continuing stream of immigration also makes accurate polling more difficult, since racial and ethnic groups tend to have distinctive voting patterns.
It used to be that pollsters could be satisfied with representative numbers of whites and blacks in their survey samples.
Now, in states such as California and Texas, pollsters must account for Hispanics and Asians too. And beyond merely measuring the sentiments of various groups, pollsters have the further challenge of divining how to 'weight' their ethnic samples to reflect the expected rate at which demographic groups will actually turn out at the polls on Election Day. . That's not as big a problem in states that are relatively racially homogeneous, such as South Dakota, where polls consistently showed the Senate race between Democrat Tim Johnson and Republican John Thune as close as it turned out to be on Election Day.
(Mr. Johnson beat Mr. Thune by a slender margin of less than one percentage point.) But with the Census Bureau projecting that the U.S. overall will became a nation of minorities by the year 2055, that problem will grow, not recede."
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