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Beyond exit polls: AP tests online surveys of voters
To help in calling winners and explaining why candidates won, The Associated Press has been testing new ways to survey voters around Election Day. After all, in the last presidential election, more than a third of voters did not go to a polling place on Election Day but instead voted ahead of time or by mail.
With a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation , AP hired GfK Custom Research to conduct an experiment with online surveys during last fall’s general elections in Kentucky and Mississippi.
Here’s what happened next, as explained by David Pace, news editor for race calls and special projects:
GfK Custom Research used itsprobability-based online panel of 55,000 people across the country to surveyvoters in the two states. AP wanted to know if the online methodology couldprovide accurate and timely estimates of candidate vote percentages in smallstates that are difficult to poll with traditional methods.
The GfK survey had the correctwinner in all seven statewide races polled in the two states, including theKentucky governor’s race. Pre-election polls had predicted a win for DemocratJack Conway, but he ended up losing to Republican Matt Bevin by almost 9percentage points. The GfK online survey had Bevin winning by just under 5points. Overall, the online poll had an average error of 3 percentage points oncandidate estimates across seven statewide races.
The surveys in Kentucky andMississippi built on experiments GfK conducted for the AP in Georgia andIllinois during the 2014 general election. Online panel estimates of candidatevote percentages in the gubernatorial and senatorial races in each of those statesproved to be much more accurate than exit poll estimates. In Georgia, forexample, a combined exit poll of Election Day voters and a telephone poll ofabsentee/early voters had Democratic winners in three of the four races. Theonline panel estimates correctly predicted Republican wins in all three races.
Here are links to GfK’s full report on eachset of experiments – Kentucky-Mississippi and Georgia-Illinois. The AP is planning additional surveys using online panels duringelections later this year. Plans are now underway to use the GfK panel tosurvey Democratic and Republican voters in one of the presidential primarystates this spring. And there almost certainly will be additional experimentswith online polling during this fall’s presidential election.
It should be noted that resultsfrom these experiments are not being used in AP’s election coverage or race calling decisions thisyear. Instead, the AP hopes the experiments will show the way to more accurateand less expensive survey methods for the 2017-2020 election cycle.
You can read more about the Likely Voter Test here.
You will also find additional data about the Kentucky-Mississippi survey here and here.
Additional data about the Georgia-Illinois survey can be found here and here. Illinois cross tabulation results can be found here. Here are cross tabulation results from Georgia.
