We get asked a lot about political polls. And while Small Business Labs is non-partisan, we're OK with talking about how political surveys are done.
There are two big issues to be aware of with political polls.
The first is how the questions are asked. It's well known that a survey can easily be slanted one way or another by the way questions are asked.
A good example is a recent poll released by President Trump's pollster. The questions asked are so slanted that's we laughed when we saw them (we could have easily found a similarly flawed democratic leaning poll. But the pro-Trump poll is recent and topical, so we went with it as our example).
The second big issue is who is polled. This is a more complicated issue.
But fortunately Pew's Why public opinion polls don’t include the same number of Republicans and Democrats nicely explains it.
As the Pew chart below shows, more Americans report either being Democrats or leaning Democrat than those reporting being or leaning Republican.
But the tricky part is figuring out how many from each party will show up and vote.
Historically, wealthier and older people vote more than younger, less well-off do. And Republicans are, on average, older and wealthier than Democrats.
So even though Democrats outnumber Republicans by quite a bit, it's almost even in terms of who turns up to vote.
The best political polls to watch, at least in our opinion, are the ones from non-partisan sources. These include Gallup, Harris and the major news organizations.
We also watch FiveThirtyEight, which provides a presidential "poll of polls" based on their assessment of the validity of about a dozen polls.
RealClearPolitics also provides a wide variety of political poll results, including state-level data.
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