What
impact do polls have on political communication? How would you assess the role
that polls and poll aggregating organizations (like FiveThirtyEight.com or
RealClearPolitics) played in the 2016 presidential election? In your opinion,
is there too much emphasis on polls by the media, politicians, and/or the
public OR is polling a valuable way to gauge political opinion? Be sure to use
at least two of the readings for this week to support your response.
Political polls are an interesting animal to examine. They play an important role in connecting the general population with the on-goings of the government and Electoral Colleges. They help Americans get pulse of the nation, and see where their opinions stand in relation to their peers. Polls are a great educational tool for those who want to gain a better understanding for the political climate of the United States. In general, polls help to contextualize political communication. They provide data that helps to predict how the American populous will swing on an Election Day, and how the general population will feel about a given topic.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, polls are an imperfect animal, and the flaws in polling reared their ugly heads during the 2016 election. Since a great deal of voters either changed their mind, or made up their minds, in the last week, the polling data that was released around Election Day was a bit skewed in most areas: "Aggregations of poll results and projections of election results had a difficult year in 2016," the (American Association for Public Opinion Research) report says. "They helped [crystallize] the erroneous belief that Clinton was a shoo-in for president," (Shepard 2017). As much as polls can help to educate us, they can also give us false conclusions. Polls rely on the opinions of common Americans, and opinions can change on a whim. In the case of the 2016 election, this change happened at an epidemic rate.
In my opinion, I don’t believe that there is too much emphasis put on polls. I think an appropriate amount of emphasis is put on polling results, because by-and-large, polls accurately represent the opinions of the group of people being surveyed. That being said, polls should not be directly relied upon, and should not be used to draw conclusions about major elections or other major political happenings. Like we saw, polls aren’t foolproof data: “Every poll, and every prediction based on it, is probabilistic in nature: There’s always a chance the leader loses,” (Bialik and Enten 2016). Polls should be used as contextual data; data that helps to support a conclusion, not directly lead to one.
The 2016 election was a blip on the radar of an otherwise reliable way to gauge political opinion. Using data from a poll on the 2016 election, one would have been able to say that Hillary Clinton had a strong performance in the popular vote. What one should NOT have said was that Hillary Clinton was going to win the 2016 election. Finding the line between correlation and causation is necessary in order to use data provided from political polls. Sites such as FiveThirtyEight.com like to say that they “predict” elections with their polls. I don’t necessarily agree with this phrasing, especially after 2016. They help to forecast how Americans may vote, but with the margin for error that most polls have, prediction is a bit of a stretch.
Works Cited
Bialik, Carl, and Harry Enten. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
Shepard, Steven. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4 May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
Polls play a large part in political communication. Polls are used in order to get an idea of who people will be voting for during the election seasons. Certain questions are asked depending on what type of election it is, for example, presidential election, off year election, general or primary election. Polls provide candidates with information about where they stand in the elections. However, polls are not always accurate. They have missed the mark many times, one specific time being the 2016 election between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. This gives the public and the candidate the wrong information which can lead to anger and frustration. According to the article “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why” it says “The miss wasn’t unprecedented or even, these days, all that unusual. Polls have missed recent elections in the U.S. and abroad by margins at least as big” (Bialik and Enten). After Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election, the public was stunned. Everyone thought the polls made mistakes, which some did make errors, however some did not. It was found that state pollsters are more problematic than national pollsters: “It’s fair to say that the national ones tend to be better financed, tend to have longer track records of rigor and really intensive adjustment. And at the state level, you get all kinds of characters. You get pollsters you’ve never heard of. You get a lot of polls that are done overnight, on a shoe-string budget” (Shepard). Personally, I feel like polls are not a valuable way to gauge political opinion. Many polls call people numerous times a day asking for information which can irritate people and lead them to providing false information. Also, polling is heavily relied on when it should not be. It can often times be misleading and cause candidates to believe they are winning/losing. Also, popular vote is different than electoral college votes. For example, even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, Donald Trump won with the electoral college. Donald Trump uses poll results to call out fake news. When Trump sees polls saying his approval rating is very low, he takes that opportunity to say the fake news is out to get him. Polls are also effective based on how they are used. If they are used to brag about accomplishments, that does not make candidates well liked. However, if the candidate uses those numbers as a rough estimate, they can better themselves and prepare going forward.
ReplyDeleteWorks Cited:
Bialik, Carl and Harry Enten. "The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why." FiveThirtyEight.com, 9 Nov. 2018.
Shepard, Steven. "5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy." Politico, 4 May 2018.
Lauren Part 2
ReplyDeleteAlso, people are afraid to admit who they voted for. Men do not want to be known as something who voted for a female and women do not want to vote for something like Trump who in the past has made rude comments towards women: "Women who voted for Trump might have been especially reluctant to tell pollsters, said David Paleologos of Suffolk University. The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll corroborated that: “Women who said they backed Trump were particularly less likely to say they would be comfortable talking to a pollster about their vote" (Bialik and Enten). Sometimes, people would give false information rather than admit to who they voted for, which also through off the numbers.
DiSalvo 1
ReplyDeletePolls play a significant role in political communication because they provide numbers to back up claims and give voters a sense of where their opinions stand in comparison to other Americans. Politicians can use these numbers during campaign season to gauge their popularity with various demographic groups and help them devise a campaign strategy. Polls also provide valuable information for the voters, but this information can be harmful. For example, in the 2016 election, many local polls showed Trump trailing Clinton by a healthy margin. This may have wrongly convinced Clinton and many Democrats that the election was in the bag. Reports like FiveThirtyEight.com “…gave Clinton anywhere from a 65 to 99 percent chance of winning…which made Clinton’s chances looks stronger than they actually were”(Shepard). The state polls especially hurt Clinton because they underestimated the Republican turnout in key states like Ohio and Minnesota and underrepresented uneducated whites. If the numbers had been more accurate, Clinton could have altered her campaign strategy to focus more on these areas and demographics. Additionally, Clinton voters in this area may have turned out in higher numbers if they believed their votes were essential.
Throughout the campaign, both candidates had historically high disapproval ratings. According to Gallup, Clinton’s was 52 percent and Trump’s was 61 percent by election day (Saad). In my opinion, these numbers make us question how we could have chosen such dismally unpopular candidates. Seeing these numbers could have diminished American trust in our institutions and decreased turnout, because for many Americans, it was a lose-lose situation.
Journalists have the tendency to cover elections as if they are sporting events with the focus on the numbers rather than the policy. This is known as horse-race journalism. In my opinion, horse-race journalism involves too much emphasis on polls because it distracts people from the real issues at stake in the election. Hillary Clinton was portrayed as ignorant to the needs of the working-class, when in fact she had a detailed plan to help manufacturers stay in America. Most Americans were busy and didn’t have the time or attention span to listen to news about her policies. Journalists attempted to capture their attention by reporting shocking poll numbers. Polls have the same sensational appeal as tabloids- they offer quick information on who Americans like and who they don’t.
Polling suffered immense criticism after 2016, but as a whole, I believe they are a necessary and valuable way to gauge public opinion. For example, in the midterm elections, polls are serving as a roadmap for ways the Democrats can take over the House and or Senate. Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight.com outlined the various outcomes of the midterm elections based on the polls. According to Silver, “In our Classic forecast, there are 11 seats that each party has at least a 10 percent chance of winning: Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia. Democrats need to win eight of those 11 to take the Senate”(Silver). For, the Democrats, the results of this poll define a potential strategy in taking the Senate. Both parties will target these states in the campaigns. Voters in both of these states should recognize their home state as a critical battleground. Polls could encourage these voters to turn out in the midterms and vote for their respective parties in hopes of a red or blue wave.
ReplyDeleteOverall, I think polls should continue to play a key role in our electoral process. However, I think there are lessons to be learned from 2016. Polls are powerful and persuasive tools in the hands of politicians and the media to mobilize voters and form educated campaign strategies. Certain groups, like uneducated whites were underrepresented in 2016. Some polls made Clinton seem like a shoo-in. The polls and the media misled the Democratic Party and it is important that they take steps to improve their methods of collection and distribution of data.
Works Cited
Saad, Lydia. "Trump and Clinton Finish with Historically Low Images.", 8 November, 2016.
Shepard, Steven. "5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.", 4 May, 2017.
Silver, Nate. "Republicans are Favorites in the Senate, but Democrats have Two Paths to an Upset.", 12 Sept., 2018.
Kevin G. Slattery
ReplyDeleteProfessor Lisa Burns
Strategic Communication in the Trump Era
23 September 2018
Blog Post # 4
Polling in the political world have large implications in the political communication world, especially when it comes to American politics. Polling is used on every level of American politics from local governments to state governments and most certainly the federal government. The use of pollsters and polling in American politics do serve many roles in American mass media. The constant polling that goes on serves as a way to communicate the feelings of polled individuals to mass media news organizations such as Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC news. While the polled individuals don’t represent the feelings or beliefs of the entire American population, the polled individuals do provide a window into what segments of the population believe and how strongly their beliefs are. For example, the Quinnipiac Poll acknowledges when they poll individuals that the individuals are selected at random (Quinnipiac Poll 1). Specifically, the Quinnipiac Poll says when they are polling individuals that they select random adults who are eighteen years or older (Quinnipiac Poll 1). The Quinnipiac Poll also says they report poll results based on registered voters and not all adults are included in the poll (Quinnipiac Poll 1).
I would argue that organizations such as FiveThirtyEight.com or Real Clear Politics played little to no role in the 2016 Presidential Election. This belief comes from the fact that the polls coming out before the election day in 2016 were so inaccurate as compared to what actually happened. Most polls had Donald Trump losing to Hillary Clinton in the General Election. In reality, Donald Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton in the General Election to claim the Office of the Presidency. According to an article by fivethirtyeight.com: “But polls are vulnerable in all states to systematic errors: understanding the proportion of voters who are white, say, or failing to get supporters of one candidate to respond with the same enthusiasm as supporters of his opponent.” (Bialik and Heten 1). These flaws in polling highlight exactly how the polls in 2016 where so different from the actual election results. In my opinion, there is too much emphasis on polls by the media and its pundits. Polls do not represent the general public accurately and they can miss key segments of the population. Polls can be used by analysts, but they should be taken with a grain as opposed to the end all and be all of how America feels about a topic.
Works Cited
Bialik, Carl, and Harry Enten. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” Fivethirtyeight.com, 9 Nov. 2016, HTTP://FIVETHIRTYEIGHT.COM/FEATURES/THE-POLLS-MISSED-TRUMP-WE-ASKED-POLLSTERS-WHY/.
“Quinnipiac University.” Quinnipiac University, www.qu.edu/.
Samantha Nardone
ReplyDeletePolls dictate nearly every move a candidate will make and it determines how newsrooms cover the campaign. The way a political figure will communicate with their audience is dependent on polling in that area. I’m not sure the last time I watched a newscast that didn’t reference polling at least once. Polling is everything in politics, right behind money. The polls had a huge effect on the 2016 election, whether or not the predictions were correct. The polls told the Democrats that they had a hold in the upper Midwest so Clinton was barely there; instead, she went to Florida and North Carolina where she had a chance to swing the election. Imagine if the polls had indicated that people in states like Wisconsin and Ohio were fed up with the Dems. Clinton would have headed there to ease concerns and reassure voters. I think because of the polls and aggregate sites, independent and moderate Democrats that did not like Clinton felt they could vote for Stein because Clinton was going to win anyways. Steven Shepard of Politico criticized the coverage of the polls saying, “The AAPOR report lays much of the blame at the feet of forecasters like the website FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times, which used polling data — and, sometimes, other data streams — to predict which candidate would win. “Aggregations of poll results and projections of election results had a difficult year in 2016," the report says. "They helped [crystallize] the erroneous belief that Clinton was a shoo-in for president.”
I think the way the public regards the polls is hypocritical. After the 2016 election, there was public outcry that the polls had gotten it wrong and that they misrepresented certain groups of people. But I bet these are the same people who aren't picking up the phone when the poll calls. How can we expect the polls to be accurate if we aren't willing to give up the time to actively participate in them? Polls are an extremely helpful tool for campaigns, the media, and the public and we need to be investing in them. “Pollsters, and the media companies whose dwindling budgets have left them commissioning fewer polls have to decide where to go from here. “Traditional methods are not in crisis, just expensive,” said Barbara Carvalho of Marist College, whose final poll of the race showed Clinton leading by 1 point, in line with her current lead. “Few want to pay for scientific polling” (Bialik and Enten, 2016). If we are going to continue to depend on polling, and I think we should, there needs to be a unified effort to invest in and support in more polls, especially on the state level. “Poll-based forecasts such as ours attempt to reduce error by combining many different polls and accounting for their quality and lean. In states with a weaker batch of polls — not enough, not recent enough or not by good enough pollsters — we’ll see more error” (Bialik and Enten, 2016). Using polling as a gauge public opinion is key to campaigns, legislation, and representation. Going forward we need to continue to improve the methods and technology used in polling. And most importantly the public needs to continue to criticize and scrutinize the data presented to them and use it in conjunction with what the media is saying.
Works Cited:
Bialik, C., & Enten, H. (2016, November 09). The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why. FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/
Shepard, S. (2017, May 04). 5 takeaways from the 2016 polling autopsy. Politico. Retrieved from https://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975
Polls impact political communication in that the results of the polls can impact what topics are talked about and how people talk about them. The topics and findings of a poll can cause certain groups of people, politicians, and news outlets to either talk about those topics more or not at all. For example, if a poll comes out that shows 60% of people in America support gun control legislation then various news outlets will be discussing those results and more people will be talking about their own support of gun control legislation. It can also impact the people who do not support more gun control legislation to speak out more about their own views and attempt to change those results for the future.
ReplyDeletePolls were used a lot to discuss the potential outcomes of the 2016 election before it actually happened. Donald Trump specifically used examples of him polling ahead of Clinton during his rallies and appearances. Even Clinton would occasionally mention a poll that had her favored as the winner. These polls are essential to undecided voters because they can almost have a bandwagon effect where if you’re on the fence about Trump and see him leading in the polls then you may feel more motivated to vote for him since other people like him as well. As it got closer to the election, news outlets were going crazy looking at all of the polls trying to make a determination of who would win. It almost felt like as soon as a new poll came out every news outlet would jump to talk about and analyze it. We know now that these polls weren’t as good of predicting the outcome of the election as we thought. A significant amount of polls had Clinton winning the election and pretty much everyone expected her to, even Trump looked a little surprised when he found out he won. Now when someone brings up the results of any poll it isn’t uncommon for someone to mention what happened in the 2016 election. It’s not that we think polls are any less reliable, it’s just that now people have realized we can’t rely as heavily on polls as we have in the past.
I’m in the middle on my stance about polls. I think they can be a good way to estimate how the public feels but they should only be interpreted as an estimate. A lot of times polls are regarded as the gospel truth about how Americans feel about certain candidates or topics. While it is a good way to gain a general understanding, unless you ask every person in America how they feel about a candidate or topic you can’t really say for sure how they feel. All in all I think polls are a useful way to get a better understanding of where voters stand on certain things, I just think that some people and news outlets take them far too seriously.
Work Cited
Shesgreen, D. (2018, June 06). Tuesday's primary elections: Three key takeaways. Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/06/06/three-takeaways-tuesdays-primary-elections/671679002/
Jr., P. B., Conroy, M., Rakich, N., Nguyen, M., Planos, J., Silver, N., . . . Laskowski, C. (n.d.). FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved from https://fivethirtyeight.com/
Polls have an increasingly large impact on political communication, and now have more power to influence others in their political opinions as well. Most of us already knew this, however the power of polling was brought to the public’s eye with the 2016 presidential election coverage in the media. Polls impact political communication in a lot of obvious, and not so obvious ways. Polls determine whether a candidate may seem more favorable, and as a result may determine their path to either a successful campaign or not. The polls in the 2016 election had mostly been about who would win: Trump or Clinton. Most of them said Clinton, and it was a shock to the American public for most of them to be so wrong. Out of this discrepancy in what polls predicted and what actually occurred, comes a new development in the polling world. Polling aggregating organizations like FiveThirtyEight and others rate polling institutions and their ability to deliver clear, unbiased and most importantly representative data to the public. In the article released by FiveThirtyEight where they rate polling institutions based on a variety of aspects, Quinnipiac Poll has an A - rating. According to the FiveThirtyEight website, “…pollster ratings are calculated by analyzing the historical accuracy of each firm’s polls along with its methodology. Accuracy scores are adjusted for the type of election polled, the poll’s sample size, the performance of other polls surveying the same race, and other factors. We also calculate measures of statistical bias in the polls,” (FiveThirtyEight). Websites like these allow people to not only receive their information about a candidate from polls, but now verify that the information is not misinformation and unrepresentative. However, it is important to note than polls missing information isn’t unprecedented. According to the article, The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why, “The miss wasn’t unprecedented or even, these days, all that unusual. Polls have missed recent elections in the U.S. and abroad by margins at least as big. Every poll, and every prediction based on it, is probabilistic in nature: There’s always a chance the leader loses,” (FiveThirtyEight).
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, I think there is too much emphasis on polls by the media and the public. While politicians rely on this data to ensure they are successfully winning over a public or not, the public and the media emphasize the polls now in a way to now persuade others to follow the mass opinion. It has become a world of divided and politicized media, and the same attitude has now dragged the polls, out of context most of the time, to deliver misinformation favorable to their network to the public. While polling is an invaluable way to gauge political public opinion, it must stay be delivered with all the context surrounding the information being delivered. Since we now live in an age where information is given so fast and quick, to garner the most clicks, one must ensure they are not being fed a piece of a story rather than the one story completely. With regard to polling, one must make note who took the poll, where it was taken, and other environmental factors. In conclusion, I think polls are too valuable to exterminate from the political process but as with everything else nowadays, must be taken with a grain of salt.
References:
DeleteNateSilver538. “Pollster Ratings.” FiveThirtyEight, 30 May 2018,
projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/.
CarlBialik. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight,
FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
Polls and the information they provide have a profound influence on political communication. Politicians, tend to trust the information larger polls provide us with, so they will use these poll results to get a sense of how their race is going. It informs things like where and how they will campaign.
ReplyDeletePeople generally trust polls as credible sources of information, which causes them to trust whatever data the poll is giving them. For most of the 2016 election pollsters gave Americans the impression that Clinton was going to win “Individual polls were wrong. Aggregated, they missed in individual states, including in many swing states. National polls were off in the same direction: Polls overstated Clinton’s lead over Trump,” (Bialik, Enton 1). I can remember my friends and family watching the news around election time -looking at the polls- and firmly believing that Clinton was going to win. This demonstrates the affect polls can have on people. It has the capability to really solidifies their opinions.
Largely, the polls don’t do a bad job: “According to a much-anticipated new report Thursday from the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the national polling was “generally correct and accurate by historical standards,” but some state polls, especially in the Upper Midwest, underestimated Trump’s standing — all leading to his surprising victory in last year’s presidential race,” (Shepard 1).
Polls and poll aggregating organizations play a big role in election cycles. What the national polls predict people and news organizations believe use as a gauge of. Media organizations will share the data from something like the Quinnipiac Poll to tell their stories, and poll aggregating organizations like FiveThirtyEight rely on their own polling methods and on larger polling organizations. If the polls don’t get it right, then the organizations and people relying on them are in the hole with them.
When you look at polling over the years it appears to be a valuable tool to gauge political opinion. I don’t believe there is an over emphasis on polls but I do believe their collaboration could be better. There is an obvious rift between national and state polls. “But rather than just criticize the aggregators and prediction modelers, Mark Blumenthal, the director of election polling at SurveyMonkey, said at the event he wanted them to be part of the solution moving forward. “This committee has a lot of members … we might disagree on this topic a little bit," Blumenthal said. "I think pollsters should be part of AAPOR's process going forward, and aggregators should be part of the process going forward. And we should all be open, and we should all be working with each other," (qtd. in Shepard 3).
Works Cited
Bialik, Carl. Enten, Harry. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” Web blog post. FiveThirtyEight. The New York Times Company, 9 Nov. 2018. Web. 24 Sept. 2018.
Shepard, Steven. “5 takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” Politico. Capital News Company, 04 May 2018. Web. 24 Sept. 2018.
Lindsey Guadagni
ReplyDeleteBlog #4
Most of the political polls about opinions are created during elections. This can persuade voters opinions and change there voting behavior towards a candidate or issue. Many people can be easily influenced so when they see most people have a certain opinion they feel maybe they should have that exact opinion as well. That is the impact that polls have on political communication. Everything about politics is socially influenced in my own personal opinion. I feel like since the was so unpredictable that when people took aggregated polls or saw them that they would also look at gender and race and then form opinions. The 2016 presidential election to me, was very segregated due to gender and race. The polls analyzed according to FiveThirtyEight.com definition is “Number of polls from the firm in FiveThirtyEight’s polls database, which covers polls conducted in the final three weeks of House, Senate, gubernatorial and presidential general election campaigns since 1998 and the last three weeks of presidential primaries and caucuses since 2000.”(NateSilver538, 2018). This shows that the polls are mainly focused on primaries and elections. How does FiveThirtyEight.coms pollster ratings work? “FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings are calculated by analyzing the historical accuracy of each firm’s polls along with its methodology. Accuracy scores are adjusted for the type of election polled, the poll’s sample size, the performance of other polls surveying the same race, and other factors. We also calculate measures of statistical bias in the polls”.(NateSilver538, 2018). This website was one of my favorite readings for this week considering its very factual and clear about how it works and how it is calculated which was very attractive to me as a reader. I find polling a valuable way to engage in politics, but polling cannot be everything, people should not be as influenced as they are by polling and us voters should be able to form our own opinions without using polling as a “crutch”. Although according to politico.com they stated that polling in the 2016 election was not very accurate considering the outcome of President Donald Trump. Policito.com stated “In the aftermath of the general election, many declared 2016 a historically bad year for polling,” the report says. “A comprehensive, dispassionate analysis shows that while that was true of some state-level polling, it was not true of national polls nor was it true of primary season polls.”(Shepard, 2017). This proves that polling should be a great way to engage in politics, but not taken as seriously as it currently is. The 2016 election proved polls can be wrong. Therefore, people should not heavily rely on polls, but they can be helpful in researching candidates and their issues and who supports them.
Citations:
NateSilver538. “Pollster Ratings.” FiveThirtyEight, 30 May 2018, projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/.
Shepard, Steven, et al. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4 May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
I think that polls play a very important role on political communication. In a field where people are always looking for the next big thing to talk about, polls can very often be a big talking point amongst those in the political communication field or mere observers. During something like the presidential election, polls are everything. They are a source of what may seem to be indisputable hard facts. There’s a reason people say numbers don’t lie. However, during the 2016 election, polls failed to capture Trump’s success. This seems quite odd to me, not in a way that I don’t know why it happened, but I wonder why I haven’t heard of this happening before. I did not really pay attention to the specifics of the election as I have mentioned before but when something like official polls are inaccurate, it seems like this is a pretty significant slip up. It was my understanding that Clinton absolutely walloped Trump in the popular vote however it would appear that this isn’t quite the case. Apparently “her true lead wasn’t enough to overcome her weak position in the Electoral College.” (Bialik, Enten) Honestly, I still do not fully understand the logistics behind the popular vote in addition with the electoral college but if Trump appeared to have been losing in the polls, there is a chance that that would swindle people in how they vote. If voters saw that Trump was losing they may try and vocally push more voters to vote Trump or vice versa. I think that there is a bit too much of an emphases on polls as now we see that they sometimes may lack accuracy. Especially in a world where media jump on any stat or fact they can to push whatever agenda they are trying to push. This all connects back to the idea of “fake news”. What do we do when the numbers we consider to be facts are no accurate? I believe that accurate polling is a good way to gauge political opinion however now we have to be able to ensure that whatever poll we are looking at is true and accurate. If people are not voicing their intentions honestly that is also something that could effect the polls as mentioned by “A number of pre-election studies, including one from POLITICO/Morning Consult, suggested there were few voters who were misreporting their actual vote intentions — and the report didn't find those studies were flawed.” (Shapard) In an election like 2016, I am certain that there were plenty of closet Trump voters but I’m not sure if there would’ve been enough to change the results of the polls as drastically as they did.
ReplyDeleteWorks Cited:
Shepard, Steven, et al. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4 May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
CarlBialik. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
Sophia Toppo
ReplyDeleteBlog 4
Polls have a big impact on political communication because it provides a variety of different opinions and preferences through out the political campaigns. Election polls mostly steer towards gaining attention about predictions for the outcome of elections, but it is also a very interesting way of how we can examine and understand how the candidates are doing through out the campaigns. This can also be helpful to the candidates so they can see how they are liked or disliked by the voters. Polling gives people the chance to voice their opinion about the candidates and the results can be reviewed to make predictions about which direction the election will go in. But sometimes polls can also be misleading like in the previous 2016 election.
After Trump’s win for presidency, it was a shock to the people because the polling results proved that Clinton was in the lead of polls. According to an article describing the five takeaways of the 2016 polling, “… Lee Miringoff, who heads the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion and participated in drafting the AAPOR report, "were driving the narrative" that Clinton's election was assured… Clinton's chances look stronger than they actually were”(Shepard 3). People had the idea that Clinton was in the lead for polls thus believed she would win the election. Polls can change, even towards the end of the election. It was indicated that, “Citing exit-poll results showing that voters who said they decided in the final week of the race tilted heavily toward Trump… It suggests that many polls were probably fairly accurate at the time they were conducted. … In that event, what was wrong with the polls was projection error (their ability to predict what would happen days or weeks later on November 8th)”(Shepard 2). In other words, people towards the end of the election steered towards Trump, which proves that polling system is slightly flawed and could change rapidly.
I still think polling is a good way to state a public opinion on which candidate is in the leave of a popular vote, but at the same time there can be many different reasons why there are errors in polling, which can make it distrustful. According to an article about the Polls missing Trump, “‘the polls were largely bad, including mine,’ Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, wrote us in an email. ‘But if anyone thinks they have the answer right now, they are just guessing’”(Bialik Enton 1). This was interesting to me because it proves how unpredictable the polls can be and people don’t know why.
Polling can determine how the American will vote in the election, but with this past election as an example, it proves that there is so much room for error that polling may only be efficient in sharing opinion.
Bialik, Carl and Harry Enten. "The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why." FiveThirtyEight.com, 9 Nov. 2018.
Shepard, Steven. "5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy." Politico, 4 May 2018.
Polling can be a peculiar facet of politics. In the political world, polls are supposed to be a snapshot of how a race is going. It is used almost as feedback for the candidates, because if polls show that their support is low, they know to tweak their campaign and reach out to voters more effectively. Polls are the closest things for political candidates to see the voice of the public by the numbers. It is difficult to measure how effective a campaign’s outreach is without polling institutes since they are an objective and third party system to gauge voters’ interests.
ReplyDeleteBesides that, it is imperative to understand that polls are not the end-all-be-all for a source of who is going to win. It is similar to a rearview mirror on a car- it shows what is coming up, but it doesn’t show you the whole picture. Sure, it will show you what a large group of Americans are thinking, but polls fail to encompass what is on each and every person’s minds. That is where response bias comes into play. Polls only have data from people who responded to them. I feel like many people assume that state and national polls run parallel the average group of Americans, but in reality it represents a slightly skewed representation. Polls for the 2016 presidential election saw just that. According to Politico’s article, “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy”, almost every reputable poll during the election foresaw Hillary Clinton winning by a landslide. In fact, the polls started that narrative because, “Those models gave Clinton anywhere from a 65 to 99 percent chance of winning — and, said Lee Miringoff, who heads the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion and participated in drafting the AAPOR report, "were driving the narrative" that Clinton's election was assured. Moreover, Miringoff said, there weren't very many high-quality state polls in the closing days of the race — which made Clinton's chances look stronger than they actually were” (Bialik and Enten 1). I feel like the polling models produced by aggregating organizations failed to reach out to the demographic that was deemed “the silent majority” after the election. This left many Americans, who either publically or privately supported Trump, unrepresented in these polls because polling institutes simply did not get out to the red areas of the country enough. Meanwhile, Hillary pulled way ahead of Trump in polls because she was the most popular choice among people who responded to the poll.
The same Politico article also argued that this idea of “silent Trump supporters” skewing the polls in favor of Clinton could not have possibly happened. I believe that this is impossible on a national scale, however, when state polls are aggregated it certainly is a possibility. It has become customary for polls to be off 2-3%, but when fifty polls meshed together it adds up. FiveThirtyEight shared a similar take in their analysis of the polls, claiming, “Individual polls were wrong. Aggregated, they missed in individual states, including in many swing states. National polls were off in the same direction: Polls overstated Clinton’s lead over Trump. And her true lead wasn’t enough to overcome her weak position in the Electoral College” (Shepard). The media ran away with the narrative that Clinton would easily win in 2016. All in all, I believe that the media sensationalizes polls way too much. There is no such thing as a fool-proof model, so it should not be hailed as important data. There is too much emphasis on polling, when in reality it is just a response-biased prediction.
Works Cited
DeleteBialik, Carl. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
Shepard, Steven, et al. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4 May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
The impact that polls have on political communication is extremely important because they allows people to get the chance to get an idea of who exactly that they will be voting for in the upcoming election and it gives them an opportunity to connect with them and gather political opinions as well, even though they are not always necessarily accurate, just like in the 2016 presidential election. Polls can also be responsible for what specific topics will be discussed and how exactly people will talk about them and/or what opinions will be formed from them.
ReplyDeleteIn the 2016 presidential election, the polls played a major roll, but not exactly in a good way. Americans often become frustrated when they learn that they can’t trust the polls that they’ve been following due to the fact that they aren’t always accurate. Although the national polls were good in the 2016 presidential election, the state polls were definitely not, especially in the Midwest. The article “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy” says “Americans want to know why polls failed to accurately capture Donald Trump’s support during the 2016 presidential campaign, but pollsters say the issue is more complicated than that.” Specifically, this article says that people lay most of the blame at the feet of forecasters such as the website FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times, which both were responsible for using polling data and even some other data streams, that could predict which candidate would end up winning. In the article “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why”, it says “the miss wasn’t unprecedented or even, these days, all that unusual. Polls have missed recent elections in the U.S. and abroad by margins at least as big. Every poll, and every prediction based on it, is probabilistic in nature: there’s always a chance the leader loses.” The 2016 presidential election was historically declared as bad.
Personally, I don’t think there is too much emphasis put on polls themselves, if anything, there’s more of an emphasis that is put on the results to see if they are accurate or not. The 2016 presidential election was a perfect example of this. Although, there has been more of more recent polls since President Trump has been in office.
Works Cited:
Bialik, C., & Enten, H. (2016, November 09). The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why. FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/
Shepard, S. (2017, May 04). 5 takeaways from the 2016 polling autopsy. Politico. Retrieved from https://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975
The 2016 presidential election was one that I will never forget because it was the first one I could vote for. Also, having a candidate like Trump in the election made the media even more obsessed with the entirety of the election. For this reason, I remember the media constantly projecting the election outcome with the use of polls.
ReplyDeleteThe polls, during the election, were always favoring Clinton which made everyone believe that Clinton would win. Honestly, the only reason I can say that everyone thought Clinton would win is because the polls said she would win. When there are statistics involved, I feel like polls have more of an impact in the political communication aspect. This is because it is harder for people to claim that a statistic is a lie rather than only saying that the media is a lie. For this reason, the polls had an incredible amount of impact on political communication. An article written by Politico stated that polls in Wisconsin “underestimated Trump by an even greater margin of 6.5 points” (Shepard). This is crazy to me because I would look at these statistics from a poll, that is supposed to be a summary of the people, and I was convinced that Trump would not win. Of course, this was not how the election turned out.
The polls of the election were wrong, but they did not know how. After reading the articles about the polls in the 2016 presidential election, I realized that there are a lot of errors that could be made in a poll. This was really surprising to me because a poll that is that important to our nation, predicted a completely different outcome. In the end, I do think that the polls and poll aggregating organizations were important during the election, but I do not think people will trust them as much anymore. In my opinion, polls were so far off that now people could think of them as “fake news,” but what people do not understand is that there are errors in polls all the time. For example, some polls do not compare education levels to the outcomes of their polls. This can alter a lot because there would be too much of a variety of people in a survey that could change the statistics at the end. In other words, putting two different demographics together to show a result does not show much. The point of a poll is to look at the people that make up our nation and see the similarities and differences between them. These errors were shocking to me, but I will always think that polls are important.
Polls are there to allow people to visualize outcomes of scenarios or just peoples opinions in general. As a whole, polling should always be taken seriously because they show us what our nation is thinking and that is what we need to see. Instead of having broadcasters explain scenarios for us, the polls are there to show us our nation’s thoughts instead of only the thoughts of politicians or any other individuals. On the other hand, I do think that polls have a lot of work to do in order to stop a variety of errors from effecting their polls. Berwood Yost, from Franklin & Marshall College stated that “he wants to see polling get more comfortable with uncertainty” (Bialik). I completely agree with Yost because polls are starting to get so scared of fake news that they are forgetting that they are the only things in the media that can be as exact as possible. Yes, there will always be errors in polls, but people trust polls on an entire different level. If polls keep allowing more errors into their work, than we won’t have anything in the media to trust.
Works Cited
DeleteBialik, Carl, and Harry Enten. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.”
FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
Shepard, Steven, et al. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4
May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
Dana Vogt
ReplyDeletePolls provide insight to how a certain public think about current politics, which can be used to gauge where political candidates stand in races. Polling can also indicate which way a public’s views lean, right or left in the case of politics, and other qualitative information. The Quinnipiac Poll is known for its national interviewing of adults, typically registered voters, and says that it “conducts timely and accurate public opinion polls on politics and public policy in Connecticut, Colorado Florida, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and nationally as a public service and for academic research” (QU Poll). Polls have the ability to contribute great deals of information to news outlets and then the public. Polls played a huge role in the 2016 presidential election, in which Hillary Clinton was leading the polls in the popular vote and likelihood of winning consistently for extended periods of time. However, polls can skew public expectations with initially optimistic results. As an article on FiveThirtyEight.com puts it, “the polls missed Donald Trump’s election. (…) Polls overstated Clinton’s lead over Trump. And her true lead wasn’t enough to overcome her weak position in the Electoral College.” (Bialik and Enten). In response to this miss of about 4 points, Berwood Yost from Franklin & Marshall College said he “wants to see polling get more comfortable with uncertainty” (Bialik and Enten) in order to predict more flexible outcomes and account for error. However, polling in general fell victim to the drama of the 2016 presidential election and it was widely regarded as a huge fail, despite the fact that “there was less than a percentage point of difference between the national polls and the actual vote” and that the major issues lied within local and state-level polls, not national polls and primary season polls (Shepard). The more wildly inaccurate polls skewed the public’s perception of polling and also gauged an inaccurate public opinion. In my opinion, reporting poll results on the news and via social media is essential in determining how the rest of society feels about a political issue, and as humans we tend to base our opinions off of the opinions of others. I personally like to know how people are generally feeling about a candidate. However, I think that the news (very broadly speaking) should tone down their constant coverage of polls during presidential elections. For example, instead of reporting on a poll daily or multiple times a day even months ahead of the official election, report once a week. Increased coverage right around the election is expected, but there is no need to hyper focus on percentages months ahead. Politicians should be expected to dwell on poll results that concern them because they need to adjust their campaigns accordingly. If one demographic is not showing support for largely Republican ideals, then Republicans will want to better target that lost public. Similarly, candidates need to know where their support lies through polling, as these positive territories are where candidates tend to rally.
Works Cited
Bialik, Enten. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight,
FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-
asked-pollsters-why/.
Shepard, Steven, et al. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO,
4 May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
Quinnipiac University. “Quinnipiac University Poll | Quinnipiac University Connecticut.” QU
Poll, Quinnipiac University, poll.qu.edu/.
I think that polls had a big impact on political communication leading up to the 2016 election. I think that everyone believed the polls up until the 2016 and once the polls were so wrong, people started doubting them. However, I feel like the media completely overblown how much the polls were wrong in 2016.
ReplyDeleteOne of the weekly readings from this week, an article by FiveThirtyEight, written by Carl Bialik and Harry Enten, states that, “Every poll, and every prediction based on it, is probabilistic in nature: There’s always a chance the leader loses. And Clinton probably didn’t even lose the national popular vote; she just didn’t win it by as much as polls suggested.”
That quote from FiveThirtyEight makes it seem like the polling wasn’t that far off. However, that is also coming from a place that constantly put out polls and said that Hillary Clinton would win the election.
I think some clarification on the problems with polls and at least my understanding on them is that they are more accurate in national elections rather than state ones. A Politico article written by Steven Sheppard states that, "It’s fair to say that the national ones tend to be better financed, tend to have longer track records of rigor and really intensive adjustment. And at the state level, you get all kinds of characters. You get pollsters you’ve never heard of. You get a lot of polls that are done overnight, on a shoestring budget," said Kennedy at an event releasing the report. "The hard question that I think this report raises is: That is not necessarily going to change going forward. It’s not clear to me that there’s any structural reason why that’s going to be different in 2018 and 2020. ... How do we fix it? That’s not an easy question to answer."
I think that poll aggregating organizations like FiveThirtyEight.com or RealClearPolitics had a major impact in the elections. I think they had made a major impact on the elections because I think that a lot of Hillary supporters saw the polls say she was going to win by a landslide and they decided that they might not need to go out and vote. I am afraid that might be happening again with the Midterm elections. I am afraid that a lot of democrats, especially in blue states, might look at the polls and the recent anti-Trump news and think that they don’t have to go out because the election is a lock for their candidates.
I think that there is way too much emphasis on polls in the media, by politicians and in the public. In this age of social media where news breaks so often, people are constantly changing their minds and learning new information. I believe that the polls can often be wrong because of that. I also remember seeing a video after the election saying that someone believed that a lot of the reason the polls were wrong was because people didn’t want to tell pollsters that they were voting for Trump because they were embarrassed about it. However, once they entered the voting booth, they finally had privacy and were able to say what they really felt.
Bialik, Carl, and Harry Enten. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
Shepard, Steven, et al. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4 May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
As a tool for gauging political opinion, polling has many nuances. There is a strong desire for statistics to explain or predict political outcomes because it quantizes the opinions of the entire country. Many Americans wonder how the politics of someone in a different region of the US affect issues they care about, and polling delivers the number of people who do. It is an upfront, impartial look into the mirror of what Americans hold as values, and the people Americans see as representative of the nation. They are undoubtedly useful for realizing what the needs of the public are, and as we saw in the 2016 election, they also evaluate the perceptions of political climate by the public, and at least attempt to predict political events as a result – even if it’s just statistics. FiveThirtyEight writes, “Polls have missed recent elections in the U.S. and abroad by margins at least as big. Every poll, and every prediction based on it, is probabilistic in nature: There’s always a chance the leader loses”(FiveThirtyEight).
ReplyDeleteThere is a perception of infallibility amongst polls by the public. They are frequently seen as the ultimate data, with no public regard being given to polling methodologies and inconsistencies therein. As Carl Bialik and Harry Enten write, “polls are vulnerable in all states to systematic errors: underestimating the proportion of voters who are white, say, or failing to get supporters of one candidate to respond with the same enthusiasm as supporters of his opponent”(Bialik, Enten). This information is then fed to the media, which is then fully digested and synthesized into the public psyche. This would explain the gross miscalculation of countless polls across the United States in predicting Hillary Clinton’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Viewing FiveThirtyEight polls that prophesized Clinton’s victory would only intensify the malaise of the Democratic Party in viewing Trump as a worthy political adversary.
The increasingly open partisanship of American media organizations compromised the interests of those citing statistical information in political news media. As Steven Shepherd writes in Politico, “there is a group of rigorous pollsters conducting national surveys, while the state pollsters are more varied and often problematic. “It’s fair to say that the national ones tend to be better financed, tend to have longer track records of rigor and really intensive adjustment. And at the state level, you get all kinds of characters. You get pollsters you’ve never heard of. You get a lot of polls that are done overnight, on a shoe-string budget"(Shepherd). These same state polls were the ones referenced in media stories in states that projected Clinton winning. The positive results for Democrats gave them nothing to worry about, and the polling organizations and media outlets that referenced them are accountable for this spread of misinformation. As the Politico article states, “he AAPOR report lays much of the blame at the feet of forecasters like the website FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times, which used polling data — and, sometimes, other data streams — to predict which candidate would win... "They helped [crystallize] the erroneous belief that Clinton was a shoo-in for president."(Shepherd)
"The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why." FiveThirtyEight.com, 9 Nov. 2018.
Delete"5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy." Politico, 4 May 2018.
Shepard, Steven. "5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy." Politico, 4 May 2018. https://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975
DeleteBialik, Carl and Harry Enten. "The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why." FiveThirtyEight.com, 9 Nov. 2018. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/
John McMahon Blog 4
ReplyDeletePolls play an important role of informing common people to the happenings (in the form of results) in government. Polls should seem black and white: questions(s) are asked, and the results of the answers are marked and tallied up for a total, showing an accurate representation of the demographic polled. Not to say that this doesn’t happen, but polling is affected by a multitude of factors. President Trump loves boasting about his high approval rating wherever he goes and polls are the ends to this mean. And this isn’t to say that the polls that Trump anecdotally uses at his speeches and rallies are incorrect, but rather makes you question the reliability of polling as a whole. Polling is a great way to aggregate meaningful or useful data for an election, but only to those who are willing to participate. At some point or another, I’ve been called by some kind of pollster to answer a question or series of questions, and most likely I’ve hung up or said “no thank you” to them. Still, polling data is still used pretty significantly when it comes to the campaign trail.
The 2016 election is a perfect example of the flaws in polling institutions. Factors such as polling funding and the polling forecasters themselves are to blame. In the 2016 election, much of the marginal “lead” Clinton had was due to errors in underfunded polls, mostly at the state level. In an article by Politico, Courtney Kennedy, the director of survey research for the Pew Research said that state polls are “all kinds of characters” and “You get pollsters you’ve never heard of. You get a lot of polls that are done overnight, on a shoe-string budget” (Shepard, 1). The most striking fact that Kennedy said about these less than reliable polls are that they are most likely not going away either, and there’s really not much of a way to fix them. Polling forecasters are to blame in part for almost cementing in that Clinton would win in 2016. The AAPOR report of the 2016 election showed that the forecasters “helped [crystallize] the erroneous belief that Clinton was a shoo-in for president” (Shepard, 1). However, “Those models gave Clinton anywhere from a 65 to 99 percent chance of winning”, which we now know to be false (Shepard, 1).
In my opinion, there is a bit too much emphasis on polling by politicians and the media. Polls are a great way to get meaningful data to use in reporting and navigate a campaign, but shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all per say. In an article on FiveThirtyEight by Carl Bialik and Harry Enten, the two tell us about an email about the 2016 election from the director of the Monmouth University polling institute saying “if anyone thinks they have the answer right now, they are just guessing.” (Bialik & Enten, 1). This is coming from the pollsters themselves! Polls should be thought of a forecast, rather than a guarantee.
Works Cited- John McMahon
DeleteBialik, Carl. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
Shepard, Steven. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4 May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
Rick Lessard
ReplyDeleteThere is an old Batman TV episode where the villain, the Penguin, decides to run for mayor of Gotham. Throughout the entire episode, the Penguin was leading Batman in the polls which caused a general concern throughout Batman’s friends. Batman assured them though not to worry because they are just polls. Obviously, Batman won the election and the Penguin went to jail. Strangely enough, this episode that is over 50 years old rings true with polls today and that one needs to take all polls with a degree of skepticism. There is no better example of putting too much emphasis into polls than the 2016 election where most of the polls were wrong in predicting the winner. With this in mind, most polls and pollster work incredibly hard to make polls as close to correct as possible.
2016 was the election that no one saw coming, let alone thinking the winner would be Donald Trump. Carl Bialik and Harry Enten wrote, “It will take a while to figure out exactly why polls missed. Reviews by pollsters and their professional organizations can take months. ‘The polls were largely bad, including mine,” Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, wrote us in an email. “But if anyone thinks they have the answer right now, they are just guessing.’” (Bialik and Enten) The polls were misguiding the public. Trump was right to say to his base that the polls were bogus. All signs pointed to Hillary Clinton winning the election and in a way those signs were right. Clinton did win the popular vote. At the time of the election, the entire country held it’s breath over the outcome, thinking “now what?” However, the pollsters were paying too much attention on the numbers and not on the movement that Trump was causing across the country. The Midwest seemed to be missed totally.
The Midwest is generally a battleground for any presidential election. Pollsters underestimated such states especially in Ohio. According to Steven Shepard, “In Ohio — the perennial bellwether Trump won easily — surveys underestimated the Republican by 5.2 points. In Wisconsin — which hadn’t awarded its electoral votes to a Republican since 1984 — the polls underestimated Trump by an even greater margin of 6.5 points.” (Shepard) That is not a huge margin of error in the grand scheme of things but that is still a big miss for pollsters. Looking back now, it seems errors like this cost Clinton the election. Pollsters make a living on being as accurate as possible and up until 2016, they were generally right. For a moment, Clinton’s victory seemed assured until suddenly the whole thing turned into that episode in Batman that was mentioned earlier.
Polls are important because they do help gauge public perception of certain topic. After the 2016, polls credibility did take a hit because they were off. Pollsters will recover and one can expect more accurate results going for the upcoming elections. Polls should be taken with seriously to a point but always taken with a grain of salt while one processes them.
Works Cited
Bialik, Carl and Harry Enten. "The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why." FiveThirtyEight.com, 9 Nov. 2018. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why
Shepard, Steven. "5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy." Politico, 4 May 2018. https://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteCali Kees
ReplyDeleteProfessor Burns
Blog Post #4
25, September 2018
Polls have a major impact on political communication as the main purpose is to measure the political interest of the public. The goal of polling is to find the United States population of adults’ stance on key political issues, where the populations leans towards voting for different politicians during midterm and presidential election years, etc. Without polling we would have to look strictly to the data and exit polls from federal, state and local elections to actually understand how the general public feels on political issues and politicians. Polling is important for the media, politicians and the public. The media can use these polls during political analysis, politicians can use them to look at the key issues Americans are worried about and their stances on those issues, the public can use polls to educate themselves about the political climate in America.
Polls had a large impact on what the public and those on the presidential campaign of the 2016 election thought the end results would be. While many of the national polls were accurate based on historical standards, there were some smaller state polls, specifically in the Upper Midwest that underestimated Trump’s standing. The article “5 Takeways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy” by Steven Shepard, Shepard goes through all the possibilities of what could have happened to cause such an upset in the 2016 election based upon the polls. The AAPOR report casts the most blame on the forecasters—websites like FiveThirtyEight and news sources like the New York Times who used polling data. “"Aggregations of poll results and projections of election results had a difficult year in 2016," the report says. "They helped [crystallize] the erroneous belief that Clinton was a shoo-in for president.",” (Shepard 3). These were the models that were driving the idea into many of the voter heads and the politicians, that Clinton, come election night, was going to win. In an article posted on fivethiryeight.com, “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” there were different reasons cited as to why it is believed that the polls missed the result of the 2016 election. It may have been the number of whites without college degrees in states, or the people that just truly didn’t want to admit or were scared to admit they were voting for Trump. “James Lee of Susquehanna Polling & Research Inc. said his firm combined live-interview and automated-dialer calls, and Trump did better when voters were sharing their voting intention with a recorded voice rather than a live one, “ (Bialik and Enten 3).
In my opinion, I do not believe that there has been too much of an emphasis put on polls. I think that based upon the results of the polls of the 2016 election and the 2016 exit polls lessons definitely need to be learned but that within political polls valuable information can be found. I think we can no longer solely rely on polls after this past election or we need to find another way to go about polling. Based upon the 2016 election the public is now very wary in polls and if we look to these new generations that will be able to vote in the next couple elections they are not going to be answering polling calls to landline phones or even their cellphones. We need to find a way to reach the younger populations where they are which is why I think pollsters should be looking to implement newer technology to gather their data for polls.
DeleteWorks Cited
Bialik, Carl, and Harry Enten. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
Shepard, Steven. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4 May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
Blog #4
ReplyDeletePolling plays an extremely important role in political communication because it allows candidates and citizens to see an estimate of voting numbers prior to an election. When new polls are released to the media they are immediately analyzed by journalists and politicians alike. This changes the entire landscape of political communication throughout a campaign because candidates will adjust their campaign motives based on recent polls. If a candidate is behind in a state such as Iowa, they will most likely rally there with attempts of better communicating with voters.
During the campaign process for the 2016 presidential election, polls showed Donald Trump losing to Hillary Clinton in a general election. The 2016 election was different in many regards to the political spectrum. A good number of people did not truthfully answer polls about the election or they did not want to admit that they were voting for than candidate Trump. Aggregating organizations for polling blindsided the American population when Trump won the presidency. Polls and top political analysts missed a large portion of the voter population while calculating totals.
In the article entitled, ‘The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.’ Authors Carl Bialik and Harry Enten wrote, “The polls missed Donald Trump’s election. Individual polls missed, at the state level and nationally (though national polls weren’t far off). So did aggregated polls. So did poll-based forecasts such as ours. And so did exit polls.” The authors are simply pointing out the fact that nearly every political poll was miscalculated during the 2016 election. With a heavy emphasis on polls from candidates and the media, many people were taken by surprise following Trump’s victory.
In my personal opinion, I do believe that media outlets put way too much emphasis on polling numbers. For the most part, polling does not capture the full slate of voters. Many people will decline to be interviewed for a particular poll, and this can leave incorrect end results. The article entitled, ‘5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy’ by Steven Shepard states, “While most national and state pollsters weigh, or adjust, their polls to ensure the right proportion of voters along gender, racial and geographic lines, they don’t always weight to educational attainment.” The author is attempting to point out that educational gaps can make a difference with regards to polling. Certain state’s citizens may be more educated than others and are more likely to answer polls on a regular basis. States particularly in the Midwest were overlooked with regards to polling.
Polls allow audiences to witness the current projections for voters in an upcoming election. Usually, making political communication about how the candidates will maintain their lead or do something to come back. Overall, the general outline of polls has a huge impact on political communication. Voters, candidates and media outlets are always waiting on projected voter numbers. Without polling, campaigns would be blind with regards to their overall success with voters.
Works Cited
Shepard, Steven, et al. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4 May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
Bialik , Carl, and Harry Enten. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
PART 1 Charlotte Gardner
ReplyDeleteI think that the polls acted in polarizing ways. For example, in the 2016 election, polls showed that Hillary had the lead against Trump at many points during the election. This, for me, made me feel secure in her potential candidacy and didn’t sway me to go out and vote. However, the polls that showed that Trump held the lead made me anxious and in the end, I did go out to vote to prevent those numbers from going up. I feel like the polls can really be the factor that decides whether or not some people will vote. By compiling actual data in real-time, polls are the most factual updates that viewers can rely on. Many people look to polls to get their information in a quick and unbiased way. However, over the years, people have been declining to participate in polls. In our own Quinnipiac polls, employees have been reporting that in around 200 calls, only 1-2 participants give answers. In addition to low numbers, there have also been reports from the poll center that when they call to states such as Texas, asking about what candidate they are voting for in local elections, many people respond with “Whoever’s red” or something along those lines.
PART 2 Charlotte Gardner
ReplyDeleteThese people don’t even know the democratic candidate and may not even know the republican candidate, but because they are so aligned to their political party they will just go with whoever is running to represent that. This worries me because I wonder how accurate the information can be if the answers given are based off of uninformed idealities. This same worry was present after the election of Donald Trump, “Courtney Kennedy, the director of survey research for the Pew Research Center who chaired the AAPOR committee that authored the report, lamented the fact that — for the most part — there is a group of rigorous pollsters conducting national surveys, while the state pollsters are more varied and often problematic” (Shepard). Local polls have the ability to become much more biased than national polls, especially if that local area is in unison on their political party or has been historically known as siding with a specific party. Quinnipiac polls are susceptible to this same problem since they can hone in on one demographic or location, according to their stated methodology, “Only adults are interviewed because we use the demographic information for weighting purposes. Weighting is a statistical adjustment of the data. Gender, age, education, race, and region are the demographics that are weighted to reflect census information” (Quinnipiac University). Still, I think that there isn’t enough focus on polls in the media, based off of my opinion. I feel that news stories or news debates take the spotlight in media and I feel that people don’t want to see polls because it isn’t something of entertainment. People want information that is most readily available to them, no matter if that information is correct or biased. I think that polls are the only secure form of data that essays to remain unbiased, and I think they are something that we need more of in this period of media-centric society.
Works Cited
Shepard, Steven, et al. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4 May 2017,
www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
Quinnipiac University. “Quinnipiac University Poll | Quinnipiac University Connecticut.” QU Poll,
poll.qu.edu/.
Polls inform people, specifically voters and politicians, how they should be behaving during an election. If the candidate that one is supporting is doing well in the polls, supporters might be more relaxed in their approach to get to the polls or aid in the campaign. On the other hand, if a candidate is losing in the polls, supporters might be more motivated to vote and campaign on their behalf. This was especially true in the 2016 election. “‘Democrats had a turnout problem,’ Gourevitch said, and therefore so did pollsters. ‘The turnout models appear to have been badly off in many states,’ said Matt Towery of Opinion Savvy" (Bialik, Enten). Democrats saw that their favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, was ahead in the polls so they were sluggish to get to the voting booths. It is questionable the effect this would have had on the electoral college, though. This is because the electoral college is theoretically supposed to be a representation of the voters in their district but, they can deviate from this.
ReplyDeletePoll aggregating organizations have such an interesting purpose. They do not organize their own poll and, instead, find the mean of all of the respected polls. This is what allows them to theoretically give a better average, accurate answer. What I especially found interesting was how bias from pollsters is accounted for.
“A pollster's historical average statistical bias toward Democratic or Republican candidates, reverted to a mean of zero based on the number of polls in the database. A score of “R +1.5,” for example, indicates that the pollster’s polls have historically overrated the performance of Republican candidates” (“Pollster Ratings”).
For whatever reason, I was under the impression that polls were supposed to be without bias. How can accurate polling be done if there is a political bias? How is the bias made evident? Is it tone or the words a pollster uses when formulating questions? The role that these aggregators play is to ensure that polling was fairly and correctly so that they can make the best assessment possible.
Personally, I love statistics so, naturally, I love polls. The issue is usually the people who answer them. They might not understand the question they are being asked or they just want to try to be funny and screw with the poll. This happened with a poll I did for my capstone. Polling allows us to view a snapshot of the country’s thoughts and study them. People naturally wonder as it is. I think that it is better to speculate with information that to just aimlessly wonder.
Bialek, Carl, and Harry Enten. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
“Pollster Ratings.” FiveThirtyEight, 30 May 2018, projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/.
This is Rachel Beaulieu. I thought I switched it to me, sorry.
DeleteSophie Rodgers
ReplyDeleteDr. Burns
MSS349-01
25 September 2018
The 2016 Presidential Election was the first one I ever invested a lot of time and interest into learning about. I was still seventeen, so I couldn’t vote yet, which actually made me all the more interested: if I couldn’t impact the race in my favor, I wanted to make sure other people were. A lot of my friends and I had anxiety about the possible outcome of a Trump win, but I remember several of them assuring me that that wouldn’t happen. They pointed to various polls and statistics they’d found online, claiming that most of them were saying the same thing: that Clinton held the lead.
Polls hold a lot of opportunity for political communication. They can give candidates feedback on how they’re doing, allowing them to alter their strategies or keep them the same. They let voters know where their opinions stand nationwide, and give them insight into possible outcomes of policies and elections. I believe polls become a problem when they are viewed less as a tool and more as a foolproof answer. It all goes back to confirmation bias: people want to trust polls that give them results they want. This can be dangerous because “every poll, and every prediction based on it, is problematic in nature: There’s always a chance the leader loses” (Bialik, Enten). Polls will never be one hundred percent accurate but for some people, results from a source they trust or align themselves with are as good as definite.
Take the 2016 election. According to an AAPOR report, many models during the campaign gave Clinton “anywhere from a 65 to 99 percent chance of winning” (Shepard). State polls, particularly in “the 13 states decided by 5 points or fewer”, polls “underestimated Trump’s margin against Clinton by 2.3 points” (Shepard). Even in Ohio, the famous battleground state that Trump eventually won easily, “surveys underesitmated the Republicans by 5.2 points” (Shepard).
Did these results create a false sense of security? Maybe. Many people, including myself, found it difficult to take Trump’s chances of winning seriously. Maybe voters put too much stock in what the polls were telling them. Lee Miringoff, head of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, claimed that polling results ended up “‘driving the narrative’ that Clinton’s election was assured” (Shepard). Polls overestimated the support Clinton actually had, and “her lead over Trump… her true lead wasn’t enough to overcome her weak position in the electoral college” (Bialik, Enten).
I’m not saying polling is the reason Clinton lost the election; I think there are a lot of reasons. And I believe we should continue to invest time and effort into the process of polling. Many polls continue to provide valuable insight into voter opinion, and continue to help candidates and their campaigns develop more effective and desireable tatctics. I think that polls, in any circumstance, are nothing more than a tool. They can help or hurt, but they do not create any events from themselves alone. They need other, concrete aspects of campaigns and elections to have any impact. When people see polls and poll results as definite and infallible evidence, things start to get messy.
Works Cited
Bialik , Carl, and Harry Enten. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
Shepard, Steven, et al. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4 May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
Jeffrey Evans
ReplyDeleteI believe that polls play a big role in political communication. Polls give candidates a platform to either really succeed or really fail. Polling allows people to analyze a candidate’s current standing in regard to how they will do in an election. Polls are usually based on people calling in, being called or doing online surveys to answer questions about the candidates. However, as we’ve seen many times before polls can be very misleading or biased. As we saw in the 2016 Presidential election the public was shocked when Donald Trump became President because his name wasn’t even listed on many of the polls. This mistake honestly isn’t really that uncommon because like I stated before there are a lot of factors that play into these polls that could make them inaccurate or biased. One of the articles states “The miss wasn’t unprecedented or even, these days, all that unusual. Polls have missed recent elections in the U.S. and abroad by margins at least as big” (Bialik and Enten 2016). This goes to show that these types of misses aren’t that unusual and these types of events happen all the time in politics. Another thing to look at when talking about polls is some of the polls might be accurate and some could be totally wrong. Shepard states "It’s fair to say that the national ones tend to be better financed, tend to have longer track records of rigor and really intensive adjustment. And at the state level, you get all kinds of characters. You get pollsters you’ve never heard of. You get a lot of polls that are done overnight, on a shoe-string budget," (Shepard 2018). This is a really good example of showing how these polls could be inaccurate. Having such polls that are conducted with less financing can lead to polls being conducted with less time which will ultimately lead to squeezing interviews all in at one time, or not getting a broader selection of people because the budget doesn’t allow enough time to find these people. When this happen they end up with a lot of people who really might not know anything about politics and just base their answers on opinion. However, I do not believe polls should be a way to gauge political opinion. First, as we saw there can be flaws in these polls like a short budget or lack of time which can throw off the results. Next, in the 2016 elections, no one had Trump on their polls and now he is the President. These polls are not the real election and only should be looked at with caution. Some people might not know about polls and still go and vote for the president. There are just too many factors for polls to have a big influence on the Presidential elections
Work Cited
Bialik, Carl, and Harry Enten. “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 10 Nov. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/.
Shepard, Steven. “5 Takeaways from the 2016 Polling Autopsy.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 4 May 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/05/04/2016-election-pollsters-react-237975.
The first campaign ad that I looked at was Donald Trump’s in 2016. Trump’s ad was a lot of what I thought it would be. There were very few facts, if any, along with accusations against the Obama administration and that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a lot of the same. The advertisement also listed different things that he would accomplish, with most of them focusing on defeating Isis and taking their oil. The Wall Street Journal stated that it was the first ad that Trump released. I think that Trump’s demographic was people who care a lot about immigration and are afraid of Isis. He came out very aggressive about how he could easily take care of Isis and I think he wanted to target people who are concerned with how the previous administration handled the terrorist organization. I think the music choice along with the pictures in the ad made it effective.
ReplyDeleteThe campaign ad I looked at for Hillary Clinton was a little different. The music in Trump’s was a lot different. Hillary’s was really upbeat while Trump’s was scary and made me feel uncomfortable. Clinton’s campaign ad featured a lot of young women who the ad wanted to show are the future with Donald Trump dubbed over talking about how he disrespects women. In my opinion, in any other election that type of ad should ruin a political opponent. However, Trump was obviously able to beat it regardless of everything that he said. Hillary’s target audience was definitely women. I think the way that she created the ad made it effective as it clearly showed Trump’s disrespect for women.
The Denton book backs up my theory on what Hillary Clinton targeted during the election. The book states, on page 103, “The overarching theme of the Clinton campaign’s advertising was Trump’s unfitness for office due to his temperament and lack of experience.” I think that it would be interesting to study whether or not she should have done more ads on what she stood for instead of just attacking him.
The Romney ad I looked at was very different than the ones I’ve seen from the 2016 election and most of that is probably due to the fact that the 2012 election, and most before it, were normal election. The Romney ad was a negative one against Obama but it wasn’t anything like the Trump/Clinton ones. Romney's camp had people who said that they had voted for Obama but were now not happy with the job he is doing. However, at one point one of the people in the ad even said that they believe Obama is a great guy! That would never happen in a political advertisement now in any sense. I think that Romney wanted to target voters that voted for Obama in 2008 and were on the fence of doing so again. If that was his target audience, I think that he was very effective at getting his message across.
The last political ad I looked at was one of Obama’s for 2012. This was the only ad that I saw that was a positive ad and didn’t attack the opponent of the candidate running it. Obama talked about the economy and the bad hand he was dealt when he took office and how much better off it is now. He put together facts and didn’t rely off of people’s feelings or emotions. The ad is what I believe political ads should be like. It laid out what Obama stands for and doesn’t attack his opponent. However, that isn’t the political climate that we’re in so candidates don’t always run ads like that. I think that Obama’s audience were voters who care deeply about the economy and by laying out facts and a plan; I think he did a great job of getting his message across.
Part 2:
DeleteThe last point is that the presidential elections aren’t the only ones with campaign ads. One of our readings shows Rep. Ron DeSantis (R) as someone who is using campaign ads to align himself with President Trump, something that is an interesting strategy given how polarizing his presidency has been. However, the ad might be working, as the document stated, “The tongue-in-cheek ad comes one month before the Florida gubernatorial primary, in which DeSantis is competing against seven other Republicans for a spot on the November ballot. But Trump’s endorsement gives DeSantis an edge over his opponents — and a bump in the latest polls.”
Overall, I think that political ads represent what is wrong with politics. For the most part, candidates attack each other without really stating what they stand for. Though I believe that should change, I don’t foresee it happening.
Works Cited:
Denton, D. E., JR. (2017). The 2016 US Presidential Campaign Political Communication and Practice. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Logan, Erin B. “'Build the Wall,' Florida Gubernatorial Candidate Tells His Young Daughter in Campaign Ad.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 31 July 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2018/07/30/build-the-wall-florida-gubernatorial-candidate-tells-his-young-daughter-in-campaign-ad/?utm_term=.d995bc4af128&wpisrc=nl_politics&wpmm=1%2B%2B%2B%7C%2BCampaign.
Professor- That reply was also me. I don't know why the name came up as "unknown" and not Josh Silverman.
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