Via Brendan Nyhan, some good points from Princeton’s Sam Wang:
Competition among pollsters. It’s not in the interest of individual pollsters to say “average my results with the others.” It’s also not advantageous to collect a larger sample once the margin of error meets industry standards.
The hungry media beast. With news budgets on the decline, it’s costly to report real news. Why pay for investigative reporting when you can buy a poll and report the horserace? Within the area of poll reporting, market forces discourage high accuracy. For example, commissioning a survey of 4 times as many people would reduce uncertainty by a factor of two. But why pay 4 times as much for data that generate a lower likelihood of an apparent – and reportable – swing?
Similarly, there’s a lot of research out there that would help put early polling information in context. But the upshot of that researcn — that it’s meaningless — makes the articles less interesting to read, so reporters don’t provide the context.
Previous in TP Media
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.