Title: Can polls be trusted? Yes, if designed well | Pew Research Center
Headings: Can we still trust polls?
Can we still trust polls?
Content: It not only has to measure public opinion, it also has to predict which of the people interviewed are going to vote and how they will vote – a notoriously difficult task. So, if election polls aren’t a reliable measure of polling accuracy, what is? There are a number of other ways we can measure the health of polling. One is to look at how polling on an issue tracks with real-world events. For example, on the issue of same-sex marriage in the United States, polls showed growing acceptance around the same time that advocates were winning statewide referenda legalizing it. The polls, in other words, were corroborated by real-world events. There are also a number of high-quality, government-funded surveys that provide us with quite accurate benchmark estimates for a range of characteristics of the U.S. population. Pollsters can ask the same questions these government surveys do to see how their results compare. In the case of Pew Research Center polls, our trends track very closely with those of high-quality benchmark polls on questions like religious identity and political affiliation. This gives us additional confidence that the trends we’re recording are accurate.