PLEASE! Marketplace, you seem like nice thoughtful people. Stop using this hack. He missed in 2008 by 4 points, in 2010 by 8 and this year by 7, the WORST among all major pollsters. One simple reason, kids. Frank Newport continues to believe that the electorate is whiter and older than it is. He projected an electorate that was not only Whiter than 2008 but Whiter than 2004, and older than not only 2008 but than 2004. This despite the census and voting facts that the electorate has gotten lss white and younger for ever election since 1980!!! Lose this hack

What a whiner! Gallup was complete trash this cycle and Silver outed them. Frank Newport isn't fooling anyone.

Time to cut Frank and this segment loose!

I admit I'm a bit late to this party, but I agree that Marketplace can do better than Gallup ... if it feels the need for any relationship with a pollster at all. The question isn't just 'why did Gallup do so poorly in this election.' The real question is how many other non-electoral polls it has gotten wrong. The Newport segments have often left me scratching my head, or bored to tears.
And if you want to know just how terrible Gallup did check out Silver's Nov 10 scorecard in which the once venerable polling firm came in dead last among two dozen pollsters who conducted at least five surveys in the last 3 weeks of the campaign.
fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-be...

Newport's comments left me baffled. When Kai said (paraphrasing), "The headline says Nate Silver got it right and Gallup got it wrong. How do you react?", Newport said, "I don't agree at all." His *next* sentence is that Nate got it right. So where, exactly, is his disagreement?

Newport goes on to say that no polls would exist if everyone aggregated. This ignores the key part of Silver's commentary on Gallup--and national polls in general--which is that they aren't very accurate. Accuracy comes from aggregating STATE polls. If the national polls dried up and died, there would still be significant utility in the state polls. There's no argument that they would disappear.

Finally, Newport clings to the idea that Gallup was statistically correct when they predicted a very close race separated by a point or two. Um. Yes, true. But you predicted that Romney would win. Do you see the problem, Frank? With elections, most people have a single question they're looking to answer. Who will win? Your poll consistently said "Romney". Through this brutal binary lens, Gallup was 100% wrong.

I'd like to see Marketplace move away from their relationship with Gallup in pursuit of thought-leaders in the polling community. And I think there's an interesting story to be explored on the decline of Gallup and other national pollsters.

There are the actual polling statistics.

There is the interpretation of those statistics.

There is the reporting on the interpretation of the statistics.

Statements like... "Gallup shows Obama trailing by five points nationally." from newspapers like the Examiner are problematic for me because they're not meaningful. This is not how our elections work.

I do think that their polls and the coverage they received in the news motivated a lot of Democrats to go out and vote though. So for that I thank Gallup.