Methodological Issues in Pre-Election Polling: Lessons from ABC News' 32-Night Tracking Poll.

Efforts to measure voter preferences and attitudes in the quadrennial U.S. presidential elections extend across the months-long campaign, starting well before the initial state-level primaries used to pick each party's nominees and continuing through the parties' political conventions and, later, the debates held between the major candidates. ABC News and The Washington Post commissioned TNS to conduct the sampling, data collection and tabulation for their pre-election polling in 2004, culminating in a 32-night tracking poll in the campaign's final weeks. This paper describes the tracking poll process and reviews methodological issues (e.g., interview day of week and number of callbacks) as well as examining the political polling issue of weighting respondents to party identification. The discussion and supporting tables/graphs show that, for the most part, these factors had surprisingly little impact on the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]