Over the summer Campaign Desk came across Vaughn Palmer, a columnist for the Vancouver Sun, who reacted in the most curious way when two contradicting polls were released measuring local government elections in British Columbia. Palmer not only reported the results, but also used the majority of his print space to explain why the two polls produced different results.
A similar situation arose in the U.S. presidential election last Friday when Gallup and the Pew Research Center simultaneously released polls with drastically different results. The Gallup poll measured Bush’s lead over Kerry among likely voters at landslide levels — 13 points, 55 percent to 42 percent. Yet, the Pew Research Poll found the race to be a virtual dead heat, with Bush leading Kerry 47 percent to 46 percent also amongst likely voters. This is the kind of thing that makes voters throw up their hands in exasperation and go out for a triple bacon cheeseburger with mayo, newly certain that no truisms are true.
Today, the Wall Street Journal‘s John Harwood Sign up for CJR's daily email
“Unprecedented voter mobilization drives” that will gain velocity right up until Nov. 2 may also shoot traditional polling models all to hell, he notes. In the meantime, polling organizations can only stand by their methods — methods that differ from poll to poll. For example, the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll uses a single question to identify who will vote and who will not, while Gallup uses a method developed decades ago that is comprised of a series of questions.
As Ms. Grimley, your high school English teacher, used to say, “There is no right answer, students.” Or, as Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster, told Harwood in reference to a pollster’s ability to measure turnout, “This is art. This isn’t science. Nobody knows.”
In the end, of course, which voters do show up is all that matters — not what the Gallup or Pew polls said a month before or even the night before election day. So, as the race comes down to the final 43 days, it’s important to remember when digesting the latest poll that every “likely” voter is not necessarily as equal as the next.
Or, as Woody Allen first noted in another context, “Ninety percent of success is just showing up.”
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.
