Nearly seven months after President Obama won reelection by a margin of 4 percentage points, the Gallup Organization, the world’s best-known polling firm, identified in a new report four main reasons why its 2012 surveys badly understated Obama’s support, Hotline’s Steven Shepard reports.
Among the problems cited: trouble in determining who is a “likely voter,” oversampling those in Central and Mountain time zones, oversampling white respondents, and using a listed landline sample as opposed to a random sample.
Gallup has partnered with the University of Michigan for a top-to-bottom review of its operations. In a written post-mortem, the pollster said it’s not averse to making “major revisions or even a replacement model” if needed to produce more accurate data.”
