If there is one thing Americans can count on during any presidential election year, it’s the constant commentary about polls. But how has polling changed in the digital age? How accurately can polls predict election outcomes? What purpose do they serve?
John Lapinski, the Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Political Science and director of the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program and the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES), addresses these questions. Lapinski also directs the Elections Unit at NBC News, where he is responsible for projecting races for the network and producing election-related stories through exit polls.
“There have been misses with polling recently,” Lapinski admits. “Is it critically important that people have a sense of who may or may not win an election before election night? I don’t think so, but it is important, given that we live in an electoral democracy, that we have some way of measuring public opinion; otherwise, the people elected to represent us won’t know what we want.”
Lapinski notes that polling has changed dramatically over the decades. “We’ve seen big differences in response rates when using online methods versus telephone. There are differences in subgroups within a population, and it’s very pronounced with younger people,” he says.
“We’re doing a huge experiment right now at PORES, running five different surveys, including telephone interviews with both landline and cellphone interviews, a text survey, and two different online methods.”
In general, Lapinski says, polls can’t predict turnout. However, “one of the beautiful aspects of election polls is that you can determine whether they’re accurate or not because elections happen. Here’s what the poll said, here’s what the results said.”
This year’s election, he adds, will be “super close.”
This story is by Jane Carroll. Read more at OMNIA.
