Political Polling in the Digital Age: The Challenge of Measuring and Understanding Public Opinion

The 2008 presidential election provided a perfect storm for pollsters. A significant portion of the population had exchanged their landlines for cellphones, which made them harder to survey. Additionally, a potential Bradley effect -- in which white voters misrepresent their intentions of voting for or against a black candidate -- skewed predictions, and aggressive voter registration and mobilization campaigns by Barack Obama combined to challenge conventional understandings about how to measure and report public preferences. In the wake of these significant changes, Political Polling in the Digital Age, edited by Kirby Goidel, offers timely and insightful interpretations of the impact these trends will have on polling. In this groundbreaking collection, contributors place recent developments in public-opinion polling into a broader historical context, examine how to construct accurate meanings from public-opinion surveys, and analyze the future of public-opinion polling. Notable contributors include Mark Blumenthal, editor and publisher of Pollster.com; Anna Greenberg, a leading Democratic pollster; and Scott Keeter, director of survey research for the Pew Research Center. In an era of increasingly personalized and interactive communications, accurate political polling is more difficult and also more important. Political Polling in the Digital Age presents fresh perspectives and relevant tactics that demystify the variable world of opinion taking.https://repository.lsu.edu/facultybooks/1471/thumbnail.jp

Strengthening Higher Education Through Gridiron Success? Public Perceptions of the Impact of National Football Championships on Academic Quality

This article examines the extent to which the public connects athletic success with academic quality, whether these connections are stronger during a year in which a state university wins a national championship, the type of respondents most likely to make such connections, and whether these connections make a difference in terms of public evaluations and support for higher education. Embedded within the 2004 survey instrument, we also consider whether respondents primed with specific question wording identifying the national championship are more likely to make the connection than respondents given more generic language referring to success in college athletics. Copyright (c) 2006 Southwestern Social Science Association.