© 2024 Milwaukee Public Media is a service of UW-Milwaukee's College of Letters & Science
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

While Clinton, Feingold Maintain Lead, Marquette Law School Poll Director Looks to Polling's Future

Which polling instrument may be most precise at prediction voter decisions - phone or internet polls?

Democrat Hillary Clinton maintains a small lead over Republican Donald Trump, among likely voters in Wisconsin, according to the latest Marquette Law School Poll. Regarding the U.S. Senate race, the poll shows Democrat Russ Feingold leading Republican incumbent Ron Johnson by six percentage points, among likely voters. Marquette gathers its information by using a combination of landline and cell phone numbers, but other pollsters are experimenting with internet polls.

Marquette Law School Poll Director Charles Franklin says there’s a good reason why some are questioning how long phone polls will be the most accurate way to gauge public sentiment.

"That does come from people being less willing to answer the phone and participate in public opinion surveys," Franklin says.

Right now, Marquette calls the randomly-generated phone numbers of 50-percent land lines and 50-percent cell phones, but land lines are disappearing, and an increasing number of people just don’t answer their mobiles if they don’t recognize the number. So if a pollster calls and no one answers, how do they find out who people are going to vote for? How ‘bout the internet? The Washington Post recently teamed up with the survey website SurveyMonkey to poll people on the presidential race.

Franklin is paying close attention to these polls.

"This is a new area of polling, doing polls over the internet rather than by telephone, and it’s an exciting area of research and development to see how well we can do using internet polls," Franklin says.

So far, it’s been a mixed bag. The Washington Post/Survey Monkey poll found, for example, that Texas - a solidly Republican state - is a tossup in the presidential election. No other traditional poll has collected a similar result. It’s an outlier, and that makes people question its accuracy. Franklin says that’s to be expected. Pollsters are still working on how to make these polls consistent and reliable.

"The methodology is just beginning to be fully developed, and some of the statistical theory behind it has come a long ways, but still needs to prove itself in practice. For that reason I think internet polling should be looked at seriously this year, but should also be looked at with a little bit of reservation until we have a few more years of experience with it," Franklin says.

Until internet polling is more reliable, pollsters with the Marquette Law School Poll will stick with calling people on their land lines and cell phones. Franklin says this method of polling has a long history of accuracy and remains reliable today.