Real Clear Politics is going to start making polling organizations accountable for their accuracy or lack of.
There have been many news stories over the last several months questioning whether polling is broken in the United States. While there are certainly challenges in the polling industry, it is not entirely accurate to suggest polling is broken. There are many quality pollsters and media outlets that are doing excellent work in a constantly changing technological and political environment. However, there are also pollsters and news organizations that are doing less-than-stellar work and, unfortunately, many of the polls from these organizations receive a disproportionate amount of attention.
To help address this problem, in the coming weeks RealClearPolitics will be rolling out a beta version ranking polling organizations. RCP will rank pollsters by their performance in recent elections, and will of course evaluate their performance in the 2022 mid-term election in just under a month. RCP's goal here is simple. Accuracy is the foundational bedrock of public trust. To that end we will be evaluating pollsters almost exclusively on one metric -- accuracy in reflecting the actual results.
There have been many news stories over the last several months questioning whether polling is broken in the United States. While there are certainly challenges in the polling industry, it is not entirely accurate to suggest polling is broken. There are many quality pollsters and media outlets that are doing excellent work in a constantly changing technological and political environment. However, there are also pollsters and news organizations that are doing less-than-stellar work and, unfortunately, many of the polls from these organizations receive a disproportionate amount of attention.
To help address this problem, in the coming weeks RealClearPolitics will be rolling out a beta version ranking polling organizations. RCP will rank pollsters by their performance in recent elections, and will of course evaluate their performance in the 2022 mid-term election in just under a month. RCP's goal here is simple. Accuracy is the foundational bedrock of public trust. To that end we will be evaluating pollsters almost exclusively on one metric -- accuracy in reflecting the actual results.
