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ANATOMY OF AN OPINION POLL
Pollsters have been telling us what we think for more than a century. Here's how the Gallup guys do it.1. Pollsters decide on the questions (e.g., Do you approve or disapprove of the way ___ is handling his job as president?).
2. Telephone numbers of potential respondents are randomly generated.
3. One thousand adults are interviewed.
4. Results are weighted to reflect nation's demographic makeup, based on U.S. Census data.
5. Editors review and interpret findings.
6. Data are published.
FLASH POINTS
The wording of questions is, along with random sampling, crucial to polling. Leading or confusing questions can produce dubious results. A poll that asked, "Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?" found that 22 percent of Americans thought it was possible the Holocaust never happened. When a clearer question was asked a year later, only 1 percent thought that.
Polls of likely voters are designed to be more accurate than polls of registered voters. They're most reliable in the late stages of a campaign as voter intentions become more fixed. "If the science of polling is sampling, selecting likely voters is the art," says Douglas Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. Differences in the way likely voters are identified are a common reason for variations among reputable polls.
Exit polls are in one sense the gold standard of polling because they question people who have actually voted as they leave the election site. Exit polls help explain not just who won but why. TV networks use them in projecting a winner. Critics fear that calling Eastern states based on exit polls can depress turnout elsewhere; since 1980 (when NBC declared the election over before the West Coast had finished voting), networks are more cautious in their predictions.
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