Here is a quick round-up of recent commentary and blogging
elsewhere on polls and surveys on the issue of how much attention we should be
paying to early trial-heat results:
- In thelatest update of his "Parse the Polls" feature, the Washington Post's Chris"The Fix" Cillizza asks three prominent partisan campaign pollsterswhether "national surveys matter?" While the pollsters "all agreed thatnational polls have real meaning" for the 2008 primary races, Cillizzaconcludes;
[N]ational polls still lag behind
early state polling when it comes to providing an up-to-the-minute look at the
state of the race. It stands to reason that voters in Iowa who see the candidates
on an almost daily basis -- either in person or on their television sets --
will have a deeper and better sense of who is truly viable than someone who
lives in Connecticut or Idaho and occasionally sees a candidate on a news
program.
- KathyFrankovic's latest CBS.com column provides some reasons "why we shouldbe cautious - and maybe even a little skeptical - when reading pollmeasurements of candidate preference this early in a presidentialcampaign." One example:
Potential voters often choose
candidates they are familiar with. Many announced candidates are simply unknown
quantities. Even after his years in the Senate and a previous presidential run,
55 percent of Americans interviewed in an April Gallup poll still could not say
whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Delaware Democratic Sen.
Joe Biden. The earliest polls say more about name recognition than likely
votes.
- Lastweek in his Slate blog, BruceReed expressed even more cynicism about the usefulnessof early primary polling. For all the poll bashing rhetoric, Reed did highlightone question I wish media pollsters would ask more often: Here is the fullresult from the most recent CNN/WMUR pollof New Hampshire Republicans (June 6-11, n=304):
"Have you definitely decided who
you will vote for in the New
Hampshire primary ... are you leaning toward someone ...
or do you have no idea who you'll vote for?"
- 6% Definitely decided
- 37% Leaning toward someone
- 57% No idea who you'll vote for
Reed is right to point out the
underlying discrepancy: Virtually all of New
Hampshire's Republicans (92%) select a candidate when
asked for whom they would vote if the election "were held today," yet a big
chunk of these also say they have "no idea" who they will support. So it is not
surprising to see results on the trial heat questions vary greatly from poll to
poll and pollster to pollster.
Internal campaign pollsters always ask some variant of the "certainty"
follow-up question, yet media pollsters rarely do. Reed urges them to
"routinely report the more revealing percentage of voters who have no earthly
idea whom they'll actually vote for." I couldn't agree more.