1. REPUBLICANS GOT A RECORD-SIZED PRIMARY FIELD
The year started with speculation that former Florida governor Jeb Bush would enter the race as a front-runner. But throughout the spring more candidates jumped into the race, culminating with a maximum of 17 candidates competing for the nomination. The HuffPollster charts for polls on the Republican primaries nearly ran out of colors.
2. DONALD TRUMP DOMINATED COVERAGE AND POLLING
HuffPollster, from July: “The latest surveys from CNN, Fox News and Economist/YouGov, all conducted since Trump announced his candidacy on June 16, show his support increasing to roughly 10 percent of Republicans nationwide. A new Quinnipiac University poll finds roughly the same support for Trump among likely caucus goers in Iowa, matching similar findings from two New Hampshire polls last week….Trump's support, as measured on early horse race polls, may turn out to be less important than the attention paid to him by the news media and the apparent appetite for such coverage. If these trends persist -- if Trump continues to consume an outsized share of the media 'oxygen' -- the long list of little known candidates will find it even harder to make news and emerge from the pack in the early states to challenge candidates like Bush and Walker who begin with higher recognition in Iowa and New Hampshire.” [HuffPost]
Predictions that he would fade didn’t pan out - What appeared to be a drop in Trump’s support in late September turned out to be a momentary plateau. His national numbers are still rising, although those polling numbers might not be indicative of what will happen in the state-by-state contests.
Trump exposed a potentially major issue with polling modes - Jonathan Robinson, a Democratic analys noticed that Trump’s support varied by how the poll was conducted. For most of the fall, Trump polled higher in Internet and automated phone polls than in live phone polls -- suggesting either that people were more likely to admit their support for the business mogul when they weren’t talking to an interviewer, or that the respondents reached by some types of surveys were more inclined to be Trump supporters. HuffPollster found that Trump was indeed the main candidate affected by poll mode, and Nate Cohn and Harry Enten examined the implications of such a large mode effect for the polling industry. [HuffPost, NYT, FiveThirtyEight]
The gap appears to have closed in the national polls, but a mid-December mode experiment conducted by Morning Consult still showed higher support for Trump online or via automated phone than when the respondents had to talk to an interviewer.
3. ELECTIONS WORLDWIDE SAW A SERIES OF POLLING MISSES
There were plenty of polling successes in 2015 around the world, but the elections in Israel and the U.K., a referendum in Greece and the gubernatorial race in Kentucky presented challenges for the industry. In Israel’s March elections, a five-day pre-election blackout on poll coverage meant that no new polls were released in that critical time frame. Private polls indicated a late shift in vote preferences that culminated in the Likud Party taking more seats on election day than had been predicted. [HuffPost]
UK election misses lead to investigation - HuffPollster, from May: “In their final national surveys, the UK pollsters were nearly unanimous in forecasting a near tie in vote preference between Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives and Ed Miliband's Labour Party, but the final results gave the Tories a better than 6 percentage point victory. They won 331 of the 650 seats in the UK Parliament, 42 seats more than even the most optimistic pre-election polling-based forecast….On Friday, the British Polling Council launched an independent inquiry similar to the investigation they conducted after the 1992 polling meltdown.” [HuffPost]
What went wrong - YouGov's postmortem suggests the polls had too many young, highly engaged voters in them, leading to overstating support for Labour. [YouGov]
Greeks reject austerity much more vigorously than expected - HuffPollster, from July: “[T]he final round of polls on the Greek referendum showed the bailout deal failing by 3 to 4 percentage points, but the actual vote was not nearly as close. The ‘no’ side prevailed by a 22-point margin -- 61 to 39 percent.” Again, late shifts in opinion could have combined with the difficulty of polling a yes/no referendum and a lack of cell phones in the polls likely contributed to the miss. [HuffPost]
Kentucky doesn’t elect a Democrat - HuffPollster, from November: “Republicans scored some significant victories on Tuesday, including an unexpected win in the Kentucky gubernatorial race. Although polls indicated that Democratic candidate Jack Conway had a slight lead, Republican Matt Bevin won, taking 53 percent of the vote.” [HuffPost]
Harry Enten summarized why it wasn't a serious miss: “I would be careful of making too much of the Kentucky results. Only three polls not sponsored by a candidate came out during the final three weeks of the campaign. That’s far less polling than was conducted in other recent polling mishaps, such as in Israel and the United Kingdom over the past year. The Kentucky results match most of the bigger misses in the U.S. during the 2014 midterm elections, such as in the Maryland gubernatorial race and Virginia Senate election, when few polls were released during the final weeks of the campaign. That’s a good thing for 2016, when the most highly anticipated races will have lots of polls in the field.” [538]
4. A GROUNDBREAKING STUDY ON GAY MARRIAGE WAS EXPOSED AS A FRAUD
HuffPollster and Lila Shapiro, from May: “Science magazine officially retracted a major study on same-sex marriage and public opinion on Thursday without the consent of the lead author, UCLA graduate student Michael J. LaCour....Thursday's statement from Science Editor-in-Chief Marcia McNutt cites two reasons for retracting the study. First, claims that survey respondents had been given cash payments to participate and refer family and friends to participate in the survey were inaccurate. Second, the funding statement was false. LaCour had misrepresented that funding for the study came from the Williams Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund. McNutt's statement notes that both of these falsifications have been confirmed by LaCour’s attorney, although it also points out that LaCour does not agree with the retraction." [HuffPost, Science retraction statement]
The incident highlighted transparency issues in public opinion work - Nate Cohn, from May: "[E]ven before the LaCour case, it was becoming obvious that a different group of public opinion researchers — public pollsters — adhere to much lower levels of transparency than academic social science does. Much of the polling world remains shielded from the kind of scrutiny that is necessary to identify and deter questionable practices. Consider how Mr. LaCour’s study fell apart. First, a team of political scientists conducted a new study to try to replicate his findings. When they could not do so, they scrutinized the original data set of individual respondents, called microdata, and found pervasive irregularities. In the polling world, no survey firm releases its microdata in a timely manner. When pollsters release it at all — usually months after publication, to an archive that requires a paid subscription for access — they seldom provide the detailed methodological explanations necessary to replicate the survey results." [NYT]
5. THE FCC ADOPTED NEW RULES THAT DISRUPT THE POLLING INDUSTRY
HuffPollster, from June: “As expected, the Federal Communications Committee adopted a set of new rules on Thursday designed to better shield Americans from unwanted calls and spam text messages…. The crux of the issue for pollsters is the apparent toughening of a provision of the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) that prohibited the use of an 'automatic telephone dialing system' to contact 'any telephone number assigned to a …cellular telephone service' without 'express prior consent' from the party being called. That provision has long prevented pollsters from dialing cell phone numbers when conducting fully automated, recorded voice polls. It also limited the degree to which live interviewer polls can use computer automation to call sampled mobile phone numbers…. As described in the FCC press release, the new rules ‘reaffirm’ the already broad definition of an autodialer, defining it as ‘any technology with the capacity to dial random or sequential numbers.’” [HuffPost]
And then there was the Gallup lawsuit - The new rules have forced many pollsters to rethink their dialing methods, especially after Gallup settled a $12 million dollar lawsuit over their use of autodialers in July. Gallup denied any wrongdoing and stated they were at the victim of a poorly defined law. FCC chairman Tom Wheeler expressed little concern about the impact the law could have on polling when he spoke before Congress in an August hearing.
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THIS WEEK'S HOLIDAY POLLING
-SurveyMonkey finds pollsters can generally still conduct a quality survey during a holiday week. [SurveyMonkey]
-Politics aside, Americans are united in their belief that 'Miracle on 34th Street' is the best Christmas movie. [Ipsos]
-Americans' favorite winter activities include celebrating holidays andy watching T.V. and movies. [Ipsos]
-If you're still Christmas shopping, keep in mind that about eight in 10 Americans prefer to receive practical gifts. [Monmouth]
-Three quarters of Americans say they do at least some of their holiday shopping online. [Rasmussen]
-Millennials overwhelmingly see Christmas as more of a cultural holiday than a religious one. [Pew]
-For the bakers: Americans overwhelmingly rank chocolate chip as the best cookie, followed by oatmeal raisin. [TargetPoint, SSRS]
-Fruit cake divides Americans by party and age, but overall, the nation would rather pass. [PPP]
-Losing weight tops Americans' list of New Year's resolutions. [Marist]