News Articles about Polls & Methods


  • Articles from the Associated Press

  • Articles from The Chicago Tribune

    • March 7, 2000.  Ken Armstrong and Steve Mills, Death penalty support erodes.  The number of Illinois voters who support the death penalty is declining, and large numbers of them favor life in prison without parole as an alternative to execution, according to a new Tribune poll. [...] The numbers mirror a similar decline nationwide. A Gallup poll released last month showed that 66 percent of Americans support capital punishment, down from 80 percent six years ago.
  • Articles from The Guardian [British newspaper]

    • January 9, 2003.  Alan Travis, Research casts doubt on internet polling.  The Guardian Internet opinion polls, now widely used by the media, risk producing flawed results no matter how much "weighting" of the data takes place to make them more representative, according to research comparing polling techniques published today.  [See full report here (pdf file).]

  • Articles from The New York Times

    • December 5, 2002.  By Adam Clymer, World Survey Says Negative Views of U.S. Are Rising. While people in most non-Muslim countries continue to view the United States favorably, negative opinions have increased in most nations over the past two years, according to public opinion surveys in 44 countries.
    • February 8, 2000.  By Andrew Kohut, A Gender War at the Ballot Box.  Usually, the differences between Republican and Democratic voters in the primaries are socioeconomic. Republicans, it can safely be said, are generally richer and better educated. But that was not the big difference in the New Hampshire primary. The parties split principally along gender lines: men flocked to the Republican primary, while women chose to vote in the Democratic contest. A gender gap that widened in the 1980's and 1990's may be more pronounced than ever.
    • January 19, 2000.  John J. Zogby, A Real Race: McCain vs. Bradley.  American voters aren't mad anymore, but they remain alienated from politics. Party affiliation means less to them now than it has in a long time. What does this mean for the 2000 campaign? Let's look at the two candidates with the broadest appeal to independent voters.

  • Articles from Slate (online magazine)

    • January 11, 2000.  Chris Suellentrop, Why Online Polls Are Bunk.  The weekly poll on the Web site of the Democratic National Committee asked visitors: "As the nation approaches a new millennium, what are the most important priorities facing our next president? Saving Social Security, strengthening Medicare and paying down the debt or implementing George W. Bush's $1.7 trillion risky tax scheme that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy?"Thanks to an organized Republican effort, more than two-thirds of the respondents favored Bush's tax cuts, prompting an embarrassed DNC to remove the poll from its site. News coverage of the incident explained that the poll was non-binding and non-scientific. But you could go further than that. Online polls aren't even polls.

  • Articles from The Washington Post

    • Monday, January 13, 2003. By Richard Morin. Election Night Poll Service to Dissolve. Networks, AP Decide to Kill VNS After Recent Problems. The major television networks and the Associated Press decided Monday to dissolve the Voter News Service exit poll consortium but have not yet reached agreement on a replacement plan to survey voters on election day.
    • February 28, 2000.  Richard Morin, Flaming the Messenger.  Purists may not like it, but the Internet could be a better way to measure public opinion.  As readers of this column know, I hate online polls. Actually, I love to hate them. Some of the columns that I've most enjoyed writing have been based on the wacky results of online balloting, such as the People magazine website poll that named Howard Stern's sidekick "Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf" as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world.  As readers of The Washington Post and the National Weekly Edition know, The Post recently sponsored a poll conducted by InterSurvey , a Palo Alto, Calif., firm that conducts surveys over the Internet. I wrote the story, with Post colleague Howard Kurtz, summarizing the results.  And as visitors to the bulletin board of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) know, Howie and I-but mostly me, and appropriately so-have been taking a wee bit of a pasting in recent days over that story, which ran last week, and that survey.
    • February 16, 2000.  Howard Kurtz; Richard Morin, For Bush, Negative Ads Are a Plus; Shown TV Spots Via Internet, Republicans Nationwide Lean Toward Governor.  In the first attempt by a news organization to measure public reaction to political ads by showing them to a national sample of adults over the Internet, The Washington Post surveyed 871 Republicans over five days ending last week. InterSurvey, a California research firm, fed the ads to respondents' television sets, which are equipped with WebTV, and they responded on keyboards to questions posed on the screen.
    • February 7, 2000.  Richard Morin, Surveys Way Off the Mark for N.H. Primary.  George W. Bush wasn't the only one to hit a bump in the road in New Hampshire. Most of the tracking polls conducted immediately before the election also stumbled and bumbled to the finish line.  But what else is new?

    • August 23, 1999.  Richard Morin, Back to the '60s?  We're feeling good about things again and trusting each other more.  There's finally some good news about the state of America's civic health: A leading indicator suggests that America has turned the corner on pessimism and is beginning to feel good about itself.  Data collected by the National Commission on Civic Renewal (NCCP) suggests that in nearly every category - political participation, trust, group membership, personal security and family strength - America is stronger today than it`s been in nearly 5 years.