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Public Opinion Quarterly 2005 69(5):642-654; doi:10.1093/poq/nfi061
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

The Methods and Accuracy of Polling

The Accuracy of the National Preelection Polls in the 2004 Presidential Election

Michael W. Traugott

MICHAEL W. TRAUGOTT is a professor of communication studies and senior research scientist at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Address correspondence to the author; e-mail: mtrau{at}umich.edu.

The 2004 presidential election campaign provided a venue for a wide variety of polling, and it was not without its controversies. In the end, the final estimates of the preelection polls, the bread and butter of the polling industry, were very good at suggesting it would be a close race, with Bush the likely winner. In historical perspective, the overall performance was above average for the period since 1956. Issues raised in the media leading up to the end of the campaign and the final estimates, however, created some controversy, especially about the likely voter methodology used by different organizations. There were also some anomalies at the end of the campaign as some firms and collaborators ended up producing different estimates of the outcome depending on likely voter definitions or the mode of data collection.


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