Election Polling Resources

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)