1. All About POLLS

2. POLLS
When reading or hearing about a poll you should look for basic information about how the poll was conducted. If pollsters don’t tell how they did the poll, you shouldn’t bother to give it your attention.
The basic elements polls should tell
The dates the poll was conducted,
Who sponsored the poll
How the data was collected,
How the people they polled were contacted
What steps were taken to make the poll representative of all voters.

3. POLLS
The Gallup Poll
Gallup interviews 500 U.S. adults for each survey, 350 days per year with minimum quotas of 40% landlines and 60% cellphones to gauge Americans' opinions on and perceptions of pressing political and economic issues and current events.
The Quinnipiac Poll
The poll is based on a random sample of (self identified) registered voters. (A random sample is one in which everyone in the population has an equal chance of being selected.) Screen questions are used to determine likely voters, e.g. intention to vote, attention to the campaign, past voting behavior, and interest in politics.
Gender, age, education, race, and region are weighted to reflect census information and random digit dialing (RDD) sampling is used. (Phone numbers are randomly generated by a computer.) Calls are made from four to seven days, from 6 to 9 p.m., Monday through Friday with additional hours on Saturday and Sunday.

4. POLLS The Pew Research Center
Pew conducts telephone surveys using a random digit sample of landline and cellphone numbers Some surveys include additional, larger samples of subgroups, such as African Americans or young people and occasionally surveys are limited to residents of particular states or regions. And sometimes special populations, such as foreign policy experts, scientists or journalists are surveyed.
In all of the surveys, probability sampling, a model of the population (a smaller version of the larger whole) is used. Most of the surveys at the Pew Research Center entail samples designed to represent the entire adult population of the U.S The Pew samples are based on RDD to assure they are unbiased and a margin of sampling error and a confidence level can be computed for them.

5. POLLS Emerson College conducts polls. For their
Presidential Polling Initiative the following
methodology was employed. First, all
respondents who did not finish the survey are
eliminated, then anyone who finished the survey
in under 4 minutes is eliminated. If a respondent said they did not vote in 2012 they are eliminated because prior voting behavior is the best predictor of future voting behavior. Finally, the results are weighted based on 2012 final election returns either nationally or by state depending on the sample and then by region (percentage of electoral vote for each region or total vote if it is a statewide poll).
The surveys are administered using an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. By eliminating the live human interviewer, the IVR system reduces interviewer bias to zero and every respondent hears the exact same message in either English or Spanish.

6. POLLS
Emerson College’s methods give a lot to be skeptical about. The IVR system means that no live interviewers are involved at any point in the process. The problem with that method is that since it’s all automated, the poll can only call landline telephones although nearly half — 47.4 percent* — of all American households are completely reliant on mobile telephones. (The Federal Communications Commission bans IVR or auto-dialed calls from going to mobile phones.) So even though Emerson gets its phone numbers from a registered voter list, which has been shown to be better than other methods+, there’s a strong probability that they aren’t polling a large portion of the population that could vote.
* Wireless Substitution: Early Release of Estimates, from the National Health Interview Survey, January– June 2015, Stephen J. Blumberg, Ph.D., and Julian V. Luke, Division of Health Interview Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics
+ How Pollsters Decide Who’s A ‘Likely Voter’ Makes A Big Difference In Results (A new report shows pollsters’ judgment can result in an 8-point difference.) [

7. POLLS
Media Coverage
The News media doesn’t treat each poll the same. According to a new study,* television news prefers to cover the most dramatic results,. “Given all the discussion on how the media covers polls … the results from this piece suggest the media potentially wields a lot of power in that they pick and choose what polls get aired — and we show they tend to pick polls with extreme results,” Kathleen Searles, an assistant professor of political science at Louisiana State University and lead author of the new paper, writes.
“Moreover, the way media cover polls that make it on air differs from the actual poll results,” she writes. “This suggests that not only are the gatekeepers selective in the polls they cover, but their coverage of their polls is distorted.”
* For whom the Poll Airs: Comparing Poll Results to Television Poll Coverage by Kathleen Searles, Martha Humphries Ginn and Jonathan Nickens, Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research

8. POLLS
Media Coverage
The main thing that drives coverage is change: Polls that reflected bigger changes are more likely to receive media attention. That suggests that the polls that are heavily covered could bear little resemblance to reality. The researchers found that a story told by heavily covered polls bears little resemblance to the one told when all polls are included. Swing voters in the polls that are most often covered, for example, tend to number much higher than what the polling average actually suggests, perhaps reflecting the fact that there’s a great deal of statistical noise involved in poll results.
In 2012 , Mitt Romney got about a five percent bump in the polls following his first debate with Barack Obama. Most politicos attributed that increase to swing voters being disappointed with Obama’s performance. But according to another study* there’s a different explanation. Polls shifted not because opinions changed, but because pollsters asked different people for their opinions before and after the debate.
* The Mythical Swing Voter, Quarterly Journal of Political Science (Vol 11, Issue 1, pp [ Andrew Gelman, Columbia University, USA, Sharad Goel, Stanford University, USA, Douglas Rivers, Stanford University, USA, David Rothschild, Microsoft Research, USA,