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Gallup Is Finally Reviewing Its Polling Methods After Its Awful 2012 Election Performance

Feb 1, 2013, 05:00 IST

Gallup announced on Thursday that it is reviewing much of its methodology after finishing the 2012 election 24th out of 28 polling firms in accuracy.

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In its final poll before the election, Gallup projected Republican nominee with 50 percent of the popular vote to President Barack Obama's 49 percent.

Obama ended up with approximately 51 percent of the final vote to Romney's 47 percent, meaning Gallup was about 5 points off.

In a blog post on Gallup's website Thursday, editor in chief Frank Newport said that the company would review a host of its methods that failed the firm this past election. He said the firm would bring in Michael Traugott, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, to aid the review. Traugott led a review of polling after the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic primary, in which virtually all polls inaccurately predicted Obama would win.

Newport writes:

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There has certainly been a great deal of discussion about election polling after last November’s presidential election, more than I recall seeing over the last five presidential elections. From our perspective, the goal is to be as accurate as possible in estimating election outcomes. [...] Our final estimate was quite similar to a number of others, and the average estimate for polls using methodology similar to Gallup’s was about +1 for Obama -- suggesting some fundamental issues with this election that affected many polls. Still, our goal is to have our estimates come as close as possible to the final result.

To that end, we launched a comprehensive review of our election polling methods shortly after the election.

Here are the 10 points Gallup is reviewing:

  • cellphone sampling and phone status weighting (Gallup used 50% cellphone interviews during the final month before the election)
  • the registered voter screening process
  • the likely voter screening process
  • measurement of early voting
  • the impact of campaign contact and get-out-the-vote efforts on the final voting electorate
  • gender and cellphone quotas within region
  • the impact of within-household selection procedures
  • Gallup interviewing house effects
  • basic representation of demographic categories in our weighted and unweighted national adult samples, including racial and ethnic groups
  • methodological issues involved in daily tracking as opposed to “stand alone” polling

See the most accurate polls of 2012 >

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