Word: pollstering
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...exude confidence, opinion polls project wildly conflicting results. One survey puts Ortega 20 points ahead of Chamorro; another gives Chamorro almost exactly the same lead. The discrepancy confirms a suspicion that Nicaraguans, unused to honest elections and chary of speaking their minds to strangers, say whatever they think a pollster wants to hear. Gallup would...
...hurt him, perhaps because the President's all-hat- and-no-cattle (as Bush likes to call showy cowboys) approach to domestic problems mirrors voters' own mixed feelings about unfinished business. White House pollster Robert Teeter, who takes monthly soundings, points out that Americans want problems addressed but have little appetite for expensive big fixes. "They want him to be doing something," says Teeter, "but they don't want him to go overboard...
...polling methods have advanced, the press has gradually elevated pollsters to the status of prophets. And journalists sometimes forget that their prophecies come not from the heavens but from a branch of mathematics called probability theory, whose most obvious application is to gambling. The concepts are commonly introduced in statistic classes with reference to coin tosses and dice. It is hardly an exact science. Roughly one time out of 20 the typical pollster's finding will fall outside the stated margin of error. And even that assumes a flawless sample that will be exactly representative of the whole population...
...voters are secure enough in their bigotry to confess such blatant bias. Wilder strategists, perhaps reflecting their candidate's de-emphasis of racial issues, argue that their putative lead was always exaggerated. "In none of our polling did we expect to have Doug much over 51%," says Wilder pollster Mike Donilon. In other words, if the election was always destined to be a cliffhanger, there was no dramatic last-minute drop-off of Wilder's white support...
Before last week's unexpectedly close Virginia contest, Pollster Harrison Hickman got revealing results by making an offbeat correlation. When white voters were questioned by white pollsters, Hickman found, they favored Republican Marshall Coleman by 16 points. But when whites were telephoned by interviewers with recognizably black intonation, they leaned to Douglas Wilder by 10 points...