Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Polling Websites: Pollingreport.com

Today I will begin a new feature taking a look at the best websites for the latest polling news, trends and data. I will start with pollingreport.com.

Pollingreport really is THE source for national political polling data. It has data for all the latest national polls on politics and policy. There are 2008 presidential race match-ups, Bush approval ratings, and polls on issues like the US Attorney controversy or illegal immigration. You have to go and search around to really see how much data is there.

The site takes each poll from national sources like Gallup, Zogby, Newsweek or Fox News and sorts them into the appropriate categories so you can find all questions on the same topic grouped together. If a question is asked by the same polling organization periodically, pollingreport lists all the data in order by date. That makes it a great source for research.

It also lists the exact wording for each question. PPP always checks how other pollsters are wording questions when we are drafting questionnaires.

Pollingreport has even more data from the state level as well as a bi-monthly newsletter with articles from an impressive list of contributors. Unfortunately, those services are only for paying subscribers.

3 comments:

  1. Off topic.

    Thought you would be interested in this post from mydd. Essentially it says that houses with only a cell phone have jumped up by a lot, all the way up to around 10% of the country.

    With such significant trends how will that affect polling? Does the fact that your polls only use voter rolls mean you arent affected as much as other pollsters?

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  2. The trend towards wireless phones will have an impact on us. How big of an impact-- I don't know. One thing I don't know is whether or not that 10% figure is higher or lower for registered voters.

    Right now I don't think the number is high enough to have a significant impact on our accuracy. Most of the wireless households are young people, who vote less often anyways.

    But we won't really know whether or not wireless phones are hurting our accuracy until after the 2008 elections-- the time all pollsters will be judged for accuracy.

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