Posts Tagged ‘polling’
“In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up”*…
In the last couple of decades, opinion polling in the U.S. has exploded; the number of national pollsters has more than doubled. Over the same period, American lifestyles have changed in ways that have challenged pollsters– and led them to innovate in a quest for accuracy. Indeed, after the embarrassment of the election of 2016, 61% of national pollsters have changed their methods…
The pollsters at The Pew Research Center— arguably the best of bunch– have polled the pollsters…
The 2016 and 2020 presidential elections left many Americans wondering whether polling was broken and what, if anything, pollsters might do about it. A new Pew Research Center study finds that most national pollsters have changed their approach since 2016, and in some cases dramatically. Most (61%) of the pollsters who conducted and publicly released national surveys in both 2016 and 2022 used methods in 2022 that differed from what they used in 2016. The study also finds the use of multiple methods increasing. Last year 17% of national pollsters used at least three different methods to sample or interview people (sometimes in the same survey), up from 2% in 2016.
This study captures what changes were made and approximately when. While it does not capture why the changes were made, public commentary by pollsters suggests a mix of factors – with some adjusting their methods in response to the profession’s recent election-related errors and others reacting to separate industry trends. The cost and feasibility of various methods are likely to have influenced decisions.
This study represents a new effort to measure the nature and degree of change in how national public polls are conducted. Rather than leaning on anecdotal accounts, the study tracked the methods used by 78 organizations that sponsor national polls and publicly release the results. The organizations analyzed represent or collaborated with nearly all the country’s best-known national pollsters. In this study, “national poll” refers to a survey reporting on the views of U.S. adults, registered voters or likely voters. It is not restricted to election vote choice (or “horserace”) polling, as the public opinion field is much broader. The analysis stretches back to 2000, making it possible to distinguish between trends emerging before 2016 (e.g., migration to online methods) and those emerging more recently (e.g., reaching respondents by text message)…
Fascinating– and important: “How Public Polling Has Changed in the 21st Century,” from @pewresearch (via friend PH).
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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As we consider our answers, we might recall that it was on this date in 2016 that Pew Research Center published the results of a poll on voter satisfaction with U.S. Presidential candidates:
Voter satisfaction with the choice of presidential candidates, already at a two-decade low, has declined even further. A new survey finds that just a third of registered voters say they are very or fairly satisfied with the choices, while 63% say they are not too or not at all satisfied. That represents a 7-percentage-point drop since June in the share of voters expressing satisfaction with their candidate choices…
Already-low voter satisfaction with choice of candidates falls even further
“It’s the end of the world as we know it / And I feel fine”*…
From the Department of Polarization…
While the percentage of Americans who are satisfied with the direction of the United States is only around 17 percent — up from 11 percent in the pits of the pandemic but still down from 41 percent two years ago — respondents are telling pollsters that nevertheless they’re personally doing just great. Fully 85 percent of respondents said they are satisfied with how things are going in their personal life, a little bit off the all-time highs of 90 percent but still definitely on the higher side of the historical range in responses to the question, which has been asked since 1979. While 51 percent of Americans are “very dissatisfied” with the direction of the country, 51 percent are also “very satisfied” with their own personal life.
@WaltHickey and his invaluable Numlock News (@NumlockAM) on Gallup‘s (@Gallup) January, 2022 “Mood of the Nation” poll.
* REM
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As we reconcile, we might recall that it was on this date in 1820 that the first 86 African American immigrants sponsored by the American Colonization Society departed New York to start a settlement in present-day Liberia.
The ACS had been founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to encourage and support the migration of free African Americans to the continent of Africa– in response to what he and his cohort saw as a growing social problem: what to do with free Blacks. Slave owners feared that these free Blacks might help their slaves to escape or rebel. At the same time, many white Americans saw African Americans as an inferior race. To these whites, “amalgamation,” or integration, of African Americans with mainstream American culture—giving them citizenship—was undesirable, if not altogether impossible. There was, the ACS argued, little prospect of changing these views. African Americans, therefore, should be relocated somewhere they could live in peace, free of prejudice, where they could be citizens.
The African-American community and abolitionist movement overwhelmingly opposed the project. Contrary to stated claims that emigration was voluntary, many African Americans were pressured into emigrating. Indeed, enslavers sometimes manumitted their slaves on condition that the freedmen leave the country immediately. William Lloyd Garrison, author of Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), proclaimed the Society a fraud. According to Garrison and his many followers, the Society was not a solution to the problem of American slavery—it actually was helping, and was intended to help, to preserve it.
According to historian Marc Leepson, “Colonization proved to be a giant failure, doing nothing to stem the forces that brought the nation to Civil War.” Between 1821 and 1847, only a few thousand African Americans, out of millions in the US, emigrated to what would become Liberia. Close to half of them died from tropical diseases.
“Suffrage is the pivotal right”*…
… but how we vote matters. We tend to take the electoral system in which we exercise our franchise for granted. Perhaps we should think more broadly. Why Is This Interesting? explains how Venice selected its Doges, and ponders the questions that raises for our own elections…
The way societies make decisions is important. There is a growing understanding that different systems can lead to quite different outcomes. Ireland rejected the British first-past-the-post system after independence and adopted the single transferable vote in 1921. New York City started using ranked-choice voting this summer, with some hiccups. Other countries have moved to full proportional representation where seats are allocated to parties more or less based on national vote share.
There’s also the question of the best level of representation. Should city councils be elected at-large for the whole city (like in Cambridge, Mass.) or in single-member districts, and how would that affect outcomes such as diversity and zoning? Perhaps some decisions should be taken away from the city council, and either moved down to the neighborhood level or up to the regional level? And should some decisions, such as monetary policy, be taken out of democratic control altogether and left to technocrats?
Using sortition to choose government officials, as Venice and Ancient Athens did, is a niche idea these days, but in common-law countries, juries deciding legal cases are (supposed to be) chosen randomly from the population. Nobel laureate Daniel McFadden wants to use “economic juries” of randomly selected people to decide on big public projects, arguing that this can better reflect public opinion than a referendum.
Since these political design choices affect policy outcomes, it would be naive to think this is only about high-minded notions of the “quality” of decisions. But that doesn’t make the question of how societies should make decisions any less interesting.
What’s the best way to hold elections? On Venice, decisions, and policy outcomes: “The Dogal Elections Edition,” from Why is This Interesting? (@WhyInteresting) Eminently worth reading in full.
[Image above: source]
* Susan B. Anthony
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As we ponder the practice of polling, we we might recall that it was on this date in 1620 that 41 adult male colonists recently arrived in what we now call Massachusetts, including two indentured servants, signed the Mayflower Compact (although it wasn’t called that at the time). Though they intended to reach the Colony of Virginia, storms had forced The Mayflower and its pilgrim passengers to anchor at the hook of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. It was unwise to continue with provisions running short. This inspired some of the non-Puritan passengers (whom the Puritans referred to as ‘Strangers’) to proclaim that they “would use their own liberty; for none had power to command them” since they would not be settling in the agreed-upon Virginia territory. To prevent this, the Pilgrims determined to establish their own government, while still affirming their allegiance to the Crown of England. Thus, the Mayflower Compact was based simultaneously upon a majoritarian model and the settlers’ allegiance to the king. It was in essence a social contract in which the settlers consented to follow the community’s rules and regulations for the sake of order and survival– the first (colonial) document to establish self-government in the New World.
“We all know that an angry electorate is a voting electorate”*…
Further to yesterday’s post…
The final vote tallies still aren’t known, but the media verdict of this presidential election is in: it’s 2016 all over again. Four years ago, in the hours after Donald Trump declared victory on the strength of 306 Electoral College votes and the ballots of nearly sixty-three million Americans, I wrote a column about the failures of the press throughout that campaign, and declared that “journalism’s moment of reckoning” had arrived. “Reporters’ eagerness first to ridicule Trump and his supporters, then to dismiss them, and finally to actively lobby and argue for their defeat have led us to a moment when the entire journalistic enterprise needs to be rethought and rebuilt,” I wrote then.
It is astonishing, today, how little we seem to have learned since. Once again, opinion polls were overhyped and under-scrutinized. Some of them were also wildly off—and, though that’s different from 2016, when the polls were largely accurate but widely misunderstood, it doesn’t let media organizations off the hook for their treatment of the numbers. Newsrooms leaned too heavily on polls as a substitute for on-the-ground reporting, and they were led astray. Journalists spent too much time talking to each other on Twitter, inhabiting an alternate algorithmic reality that bore little resemblance to the life of the country. And major media institutions made it all but impossible to envision that, despite the wealth of reporting on the president’s lies and his racism and his circus—nearly half the country remains beholden to the man and his beliefs. “We can’t go back to assuming, just because we think Donald Trump is an outlier, that he is not connecting to a lot of American people in ways that, frankly, a lot of us cannot understand,” Claire McCaskill, a former Missouri senator, said Wednesday morning on MSNBC. The feeling of déjà vu, and of lost journalistic opportunity, is inescapable…
Kyle Pope (@kylepope), editor of the Columbia Journalism Review on lessons unlearned: “What the polls show, and the press missed, again.”
On the problem(s) with polls, pair with “Of course Trump’s voters lie to pollsters. You call us all racists” (with an eye to the phenomenon it addresses– and the questions raised by the rationale it offers…)
For one (very compelling) account of why Pope’s project matters, see Fintan O’Toole’s “Democracy’s Afterlife.” (For more, see also Ron Brownstein, Roxane Gay, and George Packer on the same family of issues… there are lots of diagnoses abroad in the infosphere at the moment; these are among the best your correspondent has found.)
And for a resonant but different take on the necessary role of “honest journalism” going forward, see also Jay Rosen’s “America’s Press and the Asymmetric War for Truth.”
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As we look more deeply, we might recall that it was on this date (18 Brumaire in the French Republican Calendar) in 1799 that thirty-year-old Corsican General Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the Directory in France and established the Consulate, ending the power of the revolutionary oligarchy and creating himself as First Consul… or dictator.
“Questions are never indiscreet; answers sometimes are”*…
Once every week, Moiz Syed and Juliusz Gonera add a question to their site “How Wrong You Are“…
After one answers a question, one is shown both the correct answer and the percentage of respondents who picked each choice.
How Wrong You Are is a collection of important questions that people are sometimes misinformed about. We poll you to measure how right – or how wrong – the public is about these important questions.
Every week, we will add a new question. These are all questions that we hope you already know. But if you don’t, don’t worry! You learned something. Share your results, successful or not. Chances are, if you didn’t know this question, other people might not, either.
Find out “How Wrong You Are.”
* Oscar Wilde
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As we agonize over our answers, we might spare a thought for Franz Kafka; he died on this date in 1924. Trained as a lawyer, and settled as a young man into a job with an insurance company, Kafka began to write in his spare time. The novels (e.g., The Trial) and short stories (e.g., “Metamorphosis”) he produced made him one of the most influential authors of the 20th century; their themes– alienation, physical and psychological brutality, family conflict, terrifying quests, labyrinthine bureaucracy, and mystical transformations– were especially impactful on existentialism. Camus, Sartre, and Ionesco all cite him as a key influence, as did Marquez and Saramago. But most of this impact came after Kafka’s death: the bulk of his work was published posthumously, mostly by his friend Max Brod, who ignored Kafka’s wish to have his manuscripts destroyed.
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