INTRODUCTION

Public opinion polling has been a central element of election coverage in the media in the United States for more than 75 years. News organizations believe that elections are important and have a real meaning and consequence for their readers and viewers. From an institutional perspective, it is relatively easy to organize coverage around an event that occurs on a fixed schedule, involves conflict, has multiple sources willing to be quoted, and has a definitive conclusion when the votes are counted so a coverage package can be wrapped up. This allows news organizations to budget resources and to reallocate them along the way as they sense that campaign events warrant.

The 1936 presidential campaign marks the origin of the contemporary polling period when George Gallup struck up a business relationship with The Washington Post to publish the results of his polls. Based on his understanding of their faulty methodology, Gallup offered a money-back guarantee that he could do a better job than The Literary Digest, the leading prognosticator of presidential elections until then, so the newspaper had little to lose. Gallup had a great deal to gain in public visibility that could stimulate business from commercial clients based on his reputation in the public sector. This was the start of a long-term symbiotic relationship between news organizations and pollsters that remains today, even taking into account the financial pressures that many news organizations face and the impact of new technologies and changing lifestyles on current polling methods.

Preelection polls can assist news organizations with their coverage in several ways. They provide content about the electorate’s reactions to the candidates and their campaigns, such as measures of their issue preferences and responses to specific events. As part of a longitudinal design, they assess the shifting dynamics of the campaigns’ impacts. Of course, they can also help assess who is ahead and who is behind, supporting the worst tendencies of news organizations to engage in “horse race” journalistic coverage. This phenomenon has been exacerbated by the use of certain technologies like interactive voice recognition (IVR) methods to reduce the cost of polling and produce more frequent measures of candidate standing at both the state and national levels.

The coverage of election campaigns has evolved with the advent of technology, the 24-hour news cycle, and the use of polling information. In the 1940s and 50s, election coverage was a newspaper story; the reporting was based on interviews with political elites interpreted by career political correspondents. Often a Sunday story preceding Election Day provided a summary of the campaign and possibilities for the outcome, and a Monday story focused on Election Day weather and its likely impact on turnout. A summary of the returns would appear in Thursday morning papers. When television took over Election Night coverage in the 1960s, the reporting of returns was faster, and eventually exit polls were developed to provide an analytical capability on Election Night. By the 1970s, the networks and major metropolitan dailies combined forces and resources to establish their own polling operations, giving them editorial control over the content and timing of polls. Further technological innovation allowed them to do quick reaction polls to campaign events like debates or other sometimes unanticipated campaign events like a speech or foreign event. In this period, polls were used to collect the basic independent variables that could be used to explain why support shifted—or did not.

One problem preelection pollsters typically face is that they have to make their surveys serve different purposes. Many firms prepare three kinds of estimates for media distribution based on different samples or subsamples of the population. On the one hand, they want to measure things like presidential approval among adult citizens to maintain consistency with the time series established before the campaign started. At the same time, voting in the United States is a two-step process that requires registration to establish eligibility. Especially early in the campaign, data are reported for registered voters and then compared to all adults. Finally, turnout rates in the United States are relatively low compared to other countries, typically ranging between 55% and 60% in recent elections, and people can cast their ballots in an increasing variety of ways. In recent elections, about one-third vote before the traditional “election” day by mail, in person at early voting centers, or by absentee ballot (Baretto et al. 2006). So pollsters have to identify those who have voted, determine the “likely electorate” among those who have not, and then determine how to combine these two segments in appropriate proportions (Erikson, Panagopolous, and Wlezien 2004; Rogers and Aida 2103). These techniques are part of the “secret sauce” that distinguishes one firm from another, but the full details are not typically divulged for fear of forsaking a competitive advantage.

The accuracy of preelection polls has increased consistently over time, although some differences are seen by survey organizations, commonly referred to as “house effects” (Franklin Reference Franklin2008). Although overall the estimation of the outcome of the 2012 election was very good, some firms were consistently different across the campaign and in their final estimates. Some of this was expected based on past performance, as in the case of Rasmussen Reports and its consistent Republican bias or John Zogby’s historical Democratic bias, measured as a difference from the actual proportion of the vote each candidate received. One unexpected source of such a biased estimate was the Gallup polls that showed greater public support for Mitt Romney than the final vote tabulation provided (Sides Reference Sides2012). As a result, Gallup has undertaken a systematic review of its polling procedures to improve its estimation. They produced an interim report on their analysis to date (Gallup 2013), and their effort extended into the fall with research conducted in conjunction with the statewide gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia. The results of these studies will be publicly available and should contribute to improved methods in the industry as a whole and greater transparency with regard to preelection polling procedures.