Essay On Presidential Polls

Assessing Presidential Polls and Who Will Win the Presidency

What presidential polls tell us Americans about the race between the candidates. The polls give the people of United States a general idea of who may win the presidential election of that year. The history of political polling has not been the most accurate in the past because the margin of error was large. Past polls have represented the wrong candidate being elected into office, in the early 1900’s and before it was not as advanced as it is today. Since the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the polls have become more accurate. Around that time, the polls were off around five percent. When President Eisenhower was elected president, the polls were off about four percent. With technological

The first factor and the most important one, is how the sample group is picked. For it to be the least amount bias, the chosen group has to be picked randomly, the book says “randomly does not mean ‘at whim’.” Instead the country gets divided up into geographical regions, at that point is when the people are chosen to participate in the polling. The book also states that picking in that manor does decrease the accuracy but by a very small margin. The second factor involved with the accuracy of the poll, is how many people are selected to participate in the poll. The example the book gives states that if 400 people are selected then the accuracy is somewhere between plus or minus six percent, ninety-five percent of the time. The third and final factor is diversity, there cannot be a large group of people with the same ideas, not saying a large group of people cannot have the same ideas. Rather saying that to get the full picture of what the United States thinks, it needs to be diverse. If the people in the poll all have the same opinion there will not be an accurate poll. The book states “The greater the variation is within the population, the greater is the chance one random sample will be different from