Taegan Goddard's Political Wire

November 05, 2009

One More Look at the 2009 Polls

Mark Blumenthal has a must-read look at the final polls from Tuesday's election.

"If what you care about most is predicting the winners, it is clear that the automated surveys provided a more accurate gauge of the outcome... But that said, consider that we count on polls to do much more than predict the outcome..."

"Automated polls have been maligned, unfairly in my view, as inherently 'unreliable.' Yet when it comes to predicting election outcomes they continue to prove, NY-23 aside, at least as reliable as surveys done by conventional means. In New Jersey this week, they were more accurate in predicting the winner. At the same time, however, it would be wrong to jump to the opposite conclusion and place inherently greater trust in all automated surveys, especially when used for purposes other than predicting election outcomes."

"All polls have their limitations. Rather than trying to divide them into two categories, 'reliable' and 'crap,' we might do better to try to understand their limitations and interpret the results we see accordingly."

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Taegan D. Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites.

Goddard spent more than a decade on Wall Street as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he also served as a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Christian Science Monitor.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

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