---In this diary, I'm going to summarize the state of the polling business and after that suggest how the blogosphere- the users, not just the owners and front-pagers of large blogs like DailyKos- could potentially revolutionate the way in which polls influence politics.---
For those of you that have been following politics intensely over the last few election cycles, you might have noticed two emerging trends:
- Opinion polling is rapidly increasing in quantity. When you usually had just a few media pollsters and universities doing opinion polls in the 90's, and when you were lucky to get a poll a week in a presidential election swing state, or maybe just 2-3 polls at all in a competitive US Senate race, that has changed dramatically. Looking forward to the 2012 US Presidential Election, we can be sure that the number of national polls released every week will be close to 100, as soon as both parties have nominated the candidate. This is unprecedented and while it gives statisticians and polling junkies lots of new data, it also presents new challenges to journalists- how do you filter all that data, how do you determine how valid a poll is?
- Polling gets more automated and cheaper every day.
Back in the 90's, you usually had to pay five-digit amounts for a decent opinion poll, which is why only main media outlets could afford them.
Today, there is a new polling method available: IVR, or 'Interactive Voice Response' polling. Basically, the pollster records several questions, a computer auto-dials hundreds of landlines, and with the people who are willing to participate in the survey, they go through the script automatically.
Even though the old media pollsters and traditional polling organisations like AAPOR are busy discrediting those polls that they condescendingly call 'robopolls', there is not much evidence that they do any worse than live-interviewer polls- but they are much, much cheaper.
When you got a traditional poll for a five-digit number, you get a robopoll for a few thousand dollars, so that local newspapers and statewide campaigns can afford them- and therefore the number of polling outfits skyrocketed.
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Now, the next step to make polls even easier to access for everyone is there- with the mid-January start-up of the IVR pollster Precision Polling.
Precision Polling is absolutely different from any other pollster... in that they don't do anything except to provide the technical means for the poll. You as a user do everything yourself- you upload a phone list, you write and record your own questions. Then, the pollster contacts every number on the phone list you uploaded, and goes through the script you wrote with them. You get the raw data, and some tools you can use to crosstab and weight the data.
The price? Apart from the phone lists, $.1 a call. Note that a typical response rate for an IVR poll is roughly 5%, so that you'd end up with costs of roughly $1000 for an average opinion poll with 500 respondents- a fraction of what even 'real' IVR pollsters like RasmussenReports or SurveyUSA charge.
This instantly gave me the thought that the DailyKos community could be a... pollster. Yes, I know. DailyKos.com commissions polls with Research2000, which is great and all, but it isn't as good as I'd like it to be, for a couple of reasons:
-> kos decides where to poll with Research2000. I'd prefer it if there was a possibility of doing this as a community, such as by putting up an (unscientific, DailyKos online) poll on where to poll. Or local communities on DailyKos could fundraise internally to do a poll.
-> It would be a fun project, and we have the expertise. DailyKos has thousands of regulars, including lots of people with advanced knowledge in statistics, and I bet we have some people with good voices for recordings as well.
-> We could poll as much as we want, we're not bound by long-term contracts as Kos is. Plus, (assuming that there IS a point where we raise enough money to do some polls) if some thing like Haiti happens again, the community can easily focus on fundraising for that instead of spending money on opinion polls.
->We could be the most open, research-friendly pollster ever. We could release anonymized raw data to scientific researchers and Kossacks who want to play around with it. We could look at geeky polling things-- like, try to poll the whole population of a precinct and look at differences between our results and real (Census/Election) data. We could effectively make polling a lot better by giving statisticians and econometric students data to play with and do research on.
This is where we would differentiate ourselves from other NewMedia polling outfits like PajamasMedia or FDL- the former doesn't release anything at all about their polls, the latter does weird things like almost completely excluding youth voters. If we released the raw data, it would be almost impossible to accuse us of bias.
->Did I mention that RedState would be green.. eh, blue with envy ? ;)
So, what do you all think? Would it be worth a shot to try and organize everything and look at if the DailyKos community can raise enough money to do a test balloon?
If there's some positive feedback, I'll do a follow-up on how we can organize all this and to start actually setting up things and getting people together who would be interested in working on this project- and don't be mistaken, it would be huge. Great, useful, and an absolutely new way for the DailyKos community- to create and shift public opinion in ways that are greater than doing GOTV calls for OfA or individual campaigns (by the way, did I mention that we could also record our own robocalls/vote reminders in front of elections?)