Opinion poll
The first known example of an opinion poll was a tally of voter preferences reported by the Raleigh Star and North Carolina State Gazette and the Wilmington American Watchman and Delaware Advertiser prior to the 1824 presidential election,[1] showing Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in the contest for the United States presidency.
In 1916, The Literary Digest embarked on a national survey (partly as a circulation-raising exercise) and correctly predicted Woodrow Wilson's election as president.
Mailing out millions of postcards and simply counting the returns, The Literary Digest also correctly predicted the victories of Warren Harding in 1920, Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Herbert Hoover in 1928, and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.
Then, in 1936, its survey of 2.3 million voters suggested that Alf Landon would win the presidential election, but Roosevelt was instead re-elected by a landslide.
George Gallup's research found that the error was mainly caused by participation bias; those who favored Landon were more enthusiastic about returning their postcards.
[2] At the same time, Gallup, Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper conducted surveys that were far smaller but more scientifically based, and all three managed to correctly predict the result.
They rehabilitated the concept of consumer sovereignty by inventing scientific public opinion polls, and making it the centerpiece of their own market research, as well as the key to understanding politics.
Moving into the 1940s, the industry played a leading role in the ideological mobilization of the American people in fighting the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II.
"Advertisers", Lears concludes, "played a crucial hegemonic role in creating the consumer culture that dominated post-World War II American society.
Over the years, technological innovations have also influenced survey methods such as the availability of electronic clipboards[7] and Internet based polling.
In contrast, popular web polls draw on whoever wishes to participate rather than a scientific sample of the population, and are therefore not generally considered professional.
Statistical learning methods have been proposed in order to exploit social media content (such as posts on the micro-blogging platform Twitter) for modelling and predicting voting intention polls.
It was soon determined that the volatility of the results was at least in part due to an uneven distribution of Democratic and Republican affiliated voters in the samples.
First, they are expensive and challenging to perform since they require a representative sample of voters, and the information given on specific issues must be fair and balanced.
Government officials argue that since many Americans believe in exit polls more, election results are likely to make voters not think they are impacted electorally and be more doubtful about the credibility of news organizations.
Some blame respondents for not providing genuine answers to pollsters, a phenomenon known as social desirability-bias (also referred to as the Bradley effect or the Shy Tory Factor); these terms can be quite controversial.
The possible difference between the sample and whole population is often expressed as a margin of error – usually defined as the radius of a 95% confidence interval for a particular statistic.
[18] Another source of error stems from faulty demographic models by pollsters who weigh their samples by particular variables such as party identification in an election.
If the sampling error is too large or the level of confidence too low, it will be difficult to make reasonably precise statements about characteristics of the population of interest to the pollster.
Some people responding may not understand the words being used, but may wish to avoid the embarrassment of admitting this, or the poll mechanism may not allow clarification, so they may make an arbitrary choice.
The confusing wording of this question led to inaccurate results which indicated that 22 percent of respondents believed it seemed possible the Holocaust might not have ever happened.
Studies of mobile phone users by the Pew Research Center in the US, in 2007, concluded that "cell-only respondents are different from landline respondents in important ways, (but) they were neither numerous enough nor different enough on the questions we examined to produce a significant change in overall general population survey estimates when included with the landline samples and weighted according to US Census parameters on basic demographic characteristics.
A widely publicized failure of opinion polling to date in the United States was the prediction that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry S. Truman in the 1948 US presidential election.
Some research studies have shown that predictions made using social media signals can match traditional opinion polls.
The idea that voters are susceptible to such effects is old, stemming at least from 1884; William Safire reported that the term was first used in a political cartoon in the magazine Puck in that year.
For party-list proportional representation opinion polling helps voters avoid wasting their vote on a party below the electoral threshold.
In response, the voter is likely to generate a "mental list" in which they create reasons for a party's loss or gain in the polls.
[57] According to Douglas Bailey, a Republican who had helped run Gerald Ford's 1976 presidential campaign, "It's no longer necessary for a political candidate to guess what an audience thinks.
For instance, in Canada, it is prohibited to publish the results of opinion surveys that would identify specific political parties or candidates in the final three days before a poll closes.
[61][62] On 23 March 2023, criminal case was opened against Moscow resident Yury Kokhovets, a participant in the Radio Liberty street poll.
