There was a story posted here? the other day with a quote from a pollster who said he had to make 27,000 phone calls just to get 500 responses for one recent poll. That alone tells me that these polls don’t come close to representing actual voter sentiment.
... I run an exit polling survey project in Boyle County, Kentucky as part of a regular community-based learning component of our political science courses at Centre College. Our students have surveyed over 1,000 randomly-selected voters on their way out of the voting booths in every fall election since 2011.
To examine these competing theories, I compared the results of the exit polls with the actual results in Boyle County in each of these recent elections. Central Kentucky is an especially appropriate place to test for such an effect given that the economic and demographic characteristics are favorable to a candidate like Mr. Trump (he won Boyle County with 62 percent of the vote). The results are shown here:
...The results shown in the graph demonstrate a clear trend. While our exit poll was almost spot-on in the 2011 election, it showed Republicans doing increasingly poor in our exit poll compared to actual results and Democrats doing increasingly better over five years of elections. In 2016, our exit poll showed Donald Trump winning 52.6 percent of Boyle County voters (he actually won 62.1 percent) and Hillary Clinton winning 47.4 percent (she actually won 33 percent)...
...As the polling industry has increasingly come to be perceived as part of the “elite establishment” by many populist conservatives, a growing proportion of the Republican electorate may simply be refusing to participate in public opinion polls. This, in turn, leads to their voting preferences being underestimated in public opinion surveys. Thus, many of the state-level polls were wrong in 2016 simply because many Trump voters told pollsters to take a hike...
Read more at huffingtonpost.com ..
... I run an exit polling survey project in Boyle County, Kentucky as part of a regular community-based learning component of our political science courses at Centre College. Our students have surveyed over 1,000 randomly-selected voters on their way out of the voting booths in every fall election since 2011.
To examine these competing theories, I compared the results of the exit polls with the actual results in Boyle County in each of these recent elections. Central Kentucky is an especially appropriate place to test for such an effect given that the economic and demographic characteristics are favorable to a candidate like Mr. Trump (he won Boyle County with 62 percent of the vote). The results are shown here:
...The results shown in the graph demonstrate a clear trend. While our exit poll was almost spot-on in the 2011 election, it showed Republicans doing increasingly poor in our exit poll compared to actual results and Democrats doing increasingly better over five years of elections. In 2016, our exit poll showed Donald Trump winning 52.6 percent of Boyle County voters (he actually won 62.1 percent) and Hillary Clinton winning 47.4 percent (she actually won 33 percent)...
...As the polling industry has increasingly come to be perceived as part of the “elite establishment” by many populist conservatives, a growing proportion of the Republican electorate may simply be refusing to participate in public opinion polls. This, in turn, leads to their voting preferences being underestimated in public opinion surveys. Thus, many of the state-level polls were wrong in 2016 simply because many Trump voters told pollsters to take a hike...
Read more at huffingtonpost.com ..
