Dutton/Frankovic: Why Polling Doesn't Match Election Results
Mark Blumenthal | June 25, 2009
Topics: Measurement , Retrospective vote questions
CBS News Director of Surveys Sarah Dutton and CBS consultant (and former polling director) Kathy Frankovic answer critics who claim their most recent survey "skews left" because a question about whether respondents supported Obama or McCain in 2008 shows Obama winning by a much wider margin (48% to 25% among all adults) than he actually received (53% to 46%). The fact that the answers to a retrospective vote question fail to match the actual vote, they write, "is nothing new:"
This poll and others have asked about past vote for many years, and the results rarely match the voting results.
Here's the most extreme example: The University of Michigan's National Election studies, arguably the best academic analyses of why Americans vote the way they do, found huge disparities in how Americans reported their 1960 vote in their 1962 and 1964 post-election studies. When Americans were asked just after the 1960 election how they voted, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were tied in the poll (matching the results: Kennedy just eked out his 1960 victory). Two years later, Americans recalled giving Kennedy a comfortable win. In 1964, after Kennedy was assassinated, the difference was even more dramatic - Americans "remembered" that they had elected Kennedy by a two to one margin!
It goes in both directions - Democratic AND Republican: In January 2002, when George W. Bush's approval rating was 82 percent, Americans recalled that they had given him a 12-point victory over Al Gore in November 2000.
Read the rest for their explanation for this common occurrence.
Slate's Chris Beam wrote about this topic last week; I wrote about it four years ago.
[Correction: The original version of this post failed to identify Kathy Frankovic as a co-author].
By Mark Blumenthal | June 25, 2009 11:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
