GL: Survey research has a long history, and a useful history. If we in news organizations don’t go out and do these polls, and attempt to find out accurately, an in a valid, and reliable, and meaningful way what people are thinking, its not as though no one else would either. We would simply have pundits, and campaigns and interest groups doing it on their own, with perhaps dubious methods and means, and trying to spin allegedly what they’d found out.

CJR: One thing you’ve mentioned on your blog is the so-called Bradley effect, when white voters overstate support for black candidates. You’ve written while that’s a possibility, it’s also a crutch that pollsters can lean on when results go bad.

GL: I’m pretty skeptical of this notion. It goes back to a handful of bad polls many years ago. And there have been plenty of other bi-racial races since then. So if it’s not a consistent effect, I don’t think it’s really a provable effect at all. There are a lot of other places to look. And they’ll be a lot of looking done.

CJR: And do you think that sort of analysis could help prevent something like this again?

GL: You never know. Pre-election polling can be and is very complicated. It is the hardest kind of polling. Opinion polling is simple. You have a known population—everyone with a landline. Take a random sample, ask them what they think, thank them and you’re done. With pre-election polling, you’re polling for an unknown—people who are actually going to vote. They won’t exist, this population, until Election Day. Estimating who they are is the hard part.

CJR: Do you anticipate a bigger effort, beyond internal reviews by individual pollsters, to sort this out?

GL: There have been calls by our professional organization, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, to pull together some sort of review panel, to take a thorough, competent look at what’s occurred here. That’s certainly something I’d support.

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