Data and Democracy

Chapter 3. How Technology Is Changing the Polling Industry

Patrick Ruffini

Patrick Ruffini is a cofounder of Echelon Insights, a survey research and analytics technology company. He has been applying data and technology to political campaigns for more than a decade. Ruffini helped establish one of the first full-fledged digital operations in Presidential politics for Bush-Cheney ’04, led digital strategy for the Republican National Committee, and later founded and grew Engage, one of the leading digital agencies on the right.

In recent elections, high-profile examples of polling missing the mark have people asking whether traditional polling is as reliable as it used to be. These questions reached a fever pitch after the UK’s recent vote to leave the European Union, with immediate pre-referendum polls pointing to a win for remaining in the EU; the 2015 UK general election, where nearly every pollster missed the Conservative Party’s comfortable win; and the stunning 2014 primary loss of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who had led by as many as 30 points in pre-election polling.

These questions come at a time when it is getting much harder and more expensive to reach a representative sample of adults over the telephone, the dominant way of reaching survey respondents for decades. Response rates have declined from 36% in 1997 to just 9% in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center. Additionally, respondents increasingly only use cell phones, which are twice as expensive to ...