Message 14664495
Keeping Track of Tracking Polls
by Declan McCullagh
Wired
2:00 a.m. Oct. 26, 2000 PDT
WASHINGTON -- Good news for conservatives: Portraitofamerica.com's latest telephone poll reveals
that George W. Bush is winning the presidential race by a hefty 6 percentage points.
Oops! No, it's actually Vice President Al Gore who will be moving into the White House, thanks to a
3-point lead over his rival, according to Zogby's latest poll featured on msnbc.com.
Or might the race between the two major-party candidates be exactly tied, as the Washington Post-ABC
News poll insists?
Welcome to the head-scratchingly bizarre world of presidential polling, where the various methods of
taking America's political pulse can mean wildly different diagnoses of the patient's condition.
Just to be clear, we're not talking about those notoriously inaccurate, click-here-to-vote online polls.
These are statistically valid polls conducted by paid professionals, usually by phoning hundreds of
random Americans every evening.
But they can't all be right.
That hasn't stopped political junkies from making the rounds of such websites, for one very good
reason. This is the first presidential election in which you don't have to be a campaign insider or
subscribe to high-priced newsletters to keep up with the latest polls.
Instead of waiting for media outlets to dole out polling data -- such as vital and underreported
electoral college counts -- data-starved wonks can simply visit the recently established websites of the
polling companies themselves. (Gallup, a leading polling firm, didn't even have a public website in
1996.)
Five groups provide daily tracking polls that are available for free:
CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll (Wednesday's results: Bush 45 percent, Gore 46 percent)
Reuters-MSNBC-Zogby poll (Bush 42 percent, Gore 45 percent)
Rasmussen's Portrait of America poll (Bush 47 percent, Gore 41 percent)
Washington Post-ABC News (Bush 46 percent, Gore 46 percent)
Voter.com-Battleground poll (Bush 45 percent, Gore 39 percent)
Now, that's a lot of reading to do over coffee every morning -- a problem that Peter Orvetti neatly
solves with his own website, orvetti.com.
Orvetti, a recent Harvard dropout who's worked for NationalJournal.com, summarizes the day's polls
in statistics-heavy morning and afternoon updates.
"In the first week of October, pageviews tripled, then tripled again in the second, and have doubled
each week since then," Orvetti says. "On election night I will be providing rolling coverage, updated
every five minutes or so rather than the 30 or 60 minutes it takes the big sites to get new returns and
projections up on election nights."
Voter.com offers a similar service: A "poll center" with writeups of the latest results.
But for true statistics buffs, nothing beats crunching the numbers yourself.
That usually means a trip to portraitofamerica.com, a data-rich website set up by Rasmussen Research.
Rasmussen, a 5-year-old firm, uses an automated dialing system to conduct interviews with whomever
answers at randomly chosen phone numbers. The results -- which include surveys such as
should-the-feds-break-up-Microsoft in addition to the standard political fare -- usually appear on their
website the following day.
"It's been picking up dramatically," says company President Scott Rasmussen about the traffic to his
website, which he says went online in its current form in early 1999.
"We expect in this month we'll hit about 3 million page views. In September we were about a million
and a half (and) about 300,000 in June," Rasmussen says.
"We have been dramatically upgrading our website as best we can," he says. "We had some trouble
earlier since we were caught off guard by the (increase in) traffic."
(On Wednesday, Zogby's website was so overloaded with visitors that it repeatedly coughed up: "HTTP
Error 403 / Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected" errors. Other sites reported similar
problems in November 1996.)
One of the reasons for differences between the polls is that Rasmussen's -- unlike others -- is
automated. Another explanation is that his computers don't try to nudge undecided voters toward one
candidate or another, which Gallup's human callers intentionally do.
And who's likely to win? "We're in a situation now where the race is Bush's to lose," Rasmussen says.
Detailed state-by-state polls, updated regularly, is what makes his figures particularly attractive to
political buffs.
The U.S. president, of course, isn't elected by a direct popular vote, but by winning a majority of the
538 electoral state-by-state votes. It's possible to win the popular vote -- by landslides in states like
California and New York -- but lose the presidency, an unusual turn of events that last occurred in
1888.
Rasmussen's presidential tracking poll released Wednesday says that Bush has a commanding share --
220 votes -- of the 270 electoral votes that are required to win. Gore, by contrast, only has 168, and
the rest of the states are too close to call.
Tracking Rasmussen's numbers every day has become a favorite hobby for Michael Frese, a
computational physicist and consultant who sends his analysis of Rasmussen's figures to a mailing list
of friends and family every day.
"I'm just a political junkie. I find it very hard for other people to give me interpretations of the data,"
says Frese, who holds a doctorate in applied math. "CNN was just on a moment ago telling me about a
poll but they only gave me (the totals and) a margin of error. They didn't give me any more
information."
Frese says he envisions providing people "with a scorecard for election night, so you won't have to rely
on NBC or CBS or Fox or whatever you're watching."
He also predicts a Bush victory: "If the election were held today, the odds would be 9 out of 10. If the
election is held two weeks from now, it's possible for it to drift a good bit because there is some
movement in the traditional Democratic strongholds back toward Gore."
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