Election Polling Resources

New for 2020: How Journalists Can Accurately Interpret and Report on Election Polls

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Make sense of the latest polls and put current results into perspective with these resources, including free access to pertinent articles from Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ), AAPOR's peer-reviewed journal. Thank you to all the AAPOR volunteers who wrote and compiled our election resource materials.

• Likely Voters
• Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ) Article on Likely Voter Modelling (PDF)
• Pew Research Center: Can Likely Voter Models Be Improved? Evidence from the 2014 U.S. House elections

• Sampling Methods for Political Polling
• Automated Polls
• Online Panels
• Margin of Sampling Error/Credibility Interval
• Measuring Sub-Group Preferences

• Special Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ) Issue on Nonresponse Bias
• Measuring Response Rates

• Explaining Exit Polls

Special Issues in Election Polling

• Herding
• A Primer on Pre-Election Polls: Or Why Different Election Polls Sometimes Have Different Results (PDF)
• What is a "Push" Poll?
• Poll Aggregators

Additional Resources

• AAPOR’s Google News Initiative Presentation: Reporting on Election Polls
• An Evaluation of 2016 Election Polls in the U.S.
• Special Issue of Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ):  New Directions in Presidential-Election Research  (2014) 
• Special Issue of Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ): The Evolution of Election Polling in the United States (2011)
• Special Issue of Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ): Polling Politics, Media, and Election Campaigns (2005)