Moving off the gold standard

Newer technologies in public opinion polling are now routinely beating "gold standard" methods

The traditional telephone public opinion poll, I’m excited to say, is increasingly looking like a thing of the past. To be clear, I am not cheering for the downfall of polls conducted by random-digit dialling (RDD) with a list of American adults; rather, I am celebrating the accuracy of newer, more technically sophisticated methods.

Public opinion research, it finally seems, has entered the 21st century.

I want to draw your attention to two analyses of the accuracy of polls during the 2020 election that have recently been published. The first is by Peter K. Enns and Jake Rothschild, political scientists at Cornell and Northwestern University. They aggregated 355 polls conducted between September 1st and November 1st 2020 and compared their error at predicting the actual election results, grouping them by whether the pollster used a “probability,” non-probability or mixed-mode survey. A good example of a probability poll is the ABC/Washington Post poll, which uses RDD to reach responde…