The Nuance of Polling

I’m an election modeler, and my entire dissertation is focusing on analyzing public opinion polling data in one form or another. I love polling. Often on this blog or on twitter I’m cautious about a new poll or what an election model can actually tell us. So I thought perhaps I should explain why polling is important even if it may not tell us who is going to be the next President.

I feel there is an imbalance on how polling is viewed. Some approach it as being completely certain and if it is outside the margin of error it is impossible. Others dismiss polling because they can’t understand how one thousand people can tell us what the entire country thinks or that 2016 showed polling was a failure. But neither of these views is accurate.

The truth is polling remains our only rigorous and mathematically grounded tool to estimate public opinion. Elections can be forecast using economic and other data but that is only because the true proportion voting for a candidate is eventually known. But polling can tell us what percentage of individuals approve a certain policy or unravel how an individual’s policy preferences to prevent terrorism are related to their risk assessment of future terrorist attacks (as I’ve done in a recent project). We can understand how and when people’s opinions do and don’t change.

Polling isn’t a magic problem solver. The results from a poll can not be treated as 100% correct. Polling has error. Sometimes that error puts us in positions where all we know is that a race is too close to call or that the country is evenly split in its support for a policy. We have to acknowledge that margin of error won’t solve all our problems and that polling is hard work. It’s not easy to predict who is a likely voter or decide between an expensive phone poll or a larger internet panel or try to determine why someone left a question blank.

It is possible for polling to be very important because it signals to our government what the people want and that sometimes polling doesn’t give us a clear answer. It’s possible for polling to “be wrong” just by random chance. But it is also possible it gives us a clear answer. Often, it gives us something to point to as important for the government to act on in a way that is far more representative than calls to a congressman or your friend’s opinions or social media comments. If followed by leaders, polling could be a pathway for a more direct democracy without forcing every citizen to give opinions on every issue.

This election, it’s important to embrace the nuance in polling. Every poll is unique and needs to be interpreted holistically considering when and how it was conducted. Every poll on the same issue or election should have different results and that’s expected and ok. Polling is usually going to be off by a handful or two of percentage points, but sometimes the message is clear because the support is so strong or weak. But polling can give us answers when nothing else will, and for that, it will always be valuable.