The Wall Street Journal notes pollsters "earned high marks in last week's elections: Surveys correctly predicted that the Democrats would win control of the House of Representatives, that the Senate would be closely contested and that Democratic gubernatorial candidates would sweep into statehouses."
Interesting observations:
Phone polls tended to be better than online surveys, and companies that used recorded voices rather than live humans in their surveys were standouts.
Taking an average of the five most recent polls for a given state, regardless of the author yielded a higher accuracy rate than most individual pollsters.
As for the actual results, "the average error on the margin of victory was tightly bunched for all the phone polls. Rasmussen (25 races) and Mason-Dixon (15) each were off by an average of fewer than four points on the margin. Zogby's phone polls (10) and SurveyUSA (18) each missed by slightly more than four points." But the performance of the Zogby Interactive online polls "missed by an average of 8.6 percentage points in those polls -- at least twice the average miss of four other polling operations I examined."
Said pollster John Zogby: "We have more work to do" on online polling, but he added, "we believe it's not only the wave of the future, but the future is very close to now."
November 16, 2006
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