Polling Accuracy Quotes

Let me tell you the polls that count, and those are the polls a couple of weeks before the election. That's when the pollsters worry about holding onto their credibility. Those are the polls that everybody remembers.

Polls are only good for dogs.

Banning pre-poll surveys is certainly no answer in today's world. Sensitising the public and the media as to the good, bad, and desirable aspects of survey research is more sensible than that.

I don't believe in the polls. I try to concentrate on the day of elections.

We liked to think that polling and political analysis had become scientific, but this campaign changes all that.

National polls basically always misinterpret the final outcome or mis-predict the final outcome.

The Digest's Presidential Poll Is On! The Digest's smooth-running machine moves with the swift precision of thirty years' experience to reduce guess-work to hard fact.

I believe that the polling data that shows people give Obama 53% approval, I happen to think the polls are right. I just think people are not being honest with the pollster.

Being a skeptical and thoughtful consumer of polls is essential.

The errors in media polling rarely benefit a Republican.

I know that a lot of people love to say that polls are wrong or don't matter, and from time to time they are - it depends on who they are polling.

There are so many ways and different people who show up and vote now. The way turnout works now. The abilities we have now to turn out voters. The polling can't understand that. And that's why the polling was so wrong in 2016. It was 100% wrong. Nobody got it right - not one public poll.

Opinion polls are not worth the paper they are written on, in my view, through the conference season. They don't settle down again until November.

One should be weary of drawing too many inferences from a single poll. You can find wildly disparate results with two different polls. There is no question that American Muslims remain one of the most marginalized and demonized groups in United States. There has been a sustained propaganda campaign against Muslims for over a decade and it doesn't disappear over night. Those attitudes are hardened. But one of the things that polling often doesn't measure is the intensity of opinions.

In the 2012 election, the polls that had made Mitt Romney so confident that he was going to win were his own internal polls, based on models that failed to accurately estimate voter turnout. But the public polls, especially statewide polls, painted a fairly accurate picture of how the electoral college might go.

Exit polls have gone notoriously wrong in the past.

In pre-election polling, momentum is more important than position, and in primary polling, national numbers are useless.

If you believe these polls, you're making a mistake.

Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?

I'm a believer in the polls, by the way. Rarely do you see a poll that's very far off.

New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State's registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they're going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can't understand what they say.

The problem is that when polls are wrong, they tend to be wrong in the same direction. If they miss in New Hampshire, for instance, they all miss on the same mistake.

Sometimes you will hear me say right on the air, 'You just cited a poll that is not even part of Real Clear Politics,' which is an average, an aggregate. Yours is seeming to be an outlier. Give me the name of that poll and the date that it was taken. I will say it right on the air.

Our polling methodology has gotten outdated, and, in fact, it's not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.

I don't put too much stock in polls.