Polling has made great strides in the use of big data and data analytics to help campaigns and advocacy efforts determine strategy and refine the audience. Essential to good polling? Strong methodology, experts say.
By Doug Usher, Ph.D.
You can’t begin a conversation about political analytics without thinking about public-opinion polling. Pollsters (and bloggers, journalists, and others) have helped popularize political data analysis to the point where a simple poll release can dramatically change the hopes, dreams, and expectations of victory for partisans on one side or the other.
Polling has made great strides in the use of big data and data analytics to help campaigns and advocacy efforts determine strategy and refine their audience. According to Kristen Soltis Anderson, a leading GOP data voice and a cofounder of Echelon Insights, “By combining polling data with known voting behavior, media consumption, and other individual-level data, strategists can now build incredible individual- and group-level campaigns that are optimized in real time.”
Yet at the same time, doubts about polling accuracy have raised questions about the industry’s future. Lower response rates and the inability to reach certain demographic groups have led to a number of high-profile “misses.”
Robert Y. Shapiro, the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government and Professor of International and Public Affairs, argues that strong methodology remains essential to good polling: “While it is hard to maintain the traditional ‘gold standard’ of polling methods, careful approaches that work to eliminate bias from nonresponse and other sources are still proving to be successful.”
The Columbia University Political Analytics program can help on both ends of this equation. Students will learn how to analyze polling data in conjunction with individual-level behavioral data to build their own models for political strategy. And they’ll also be prepared in best practices for polling—and all data gathering—to make sure that those “data-based” strategies are built on solid ground.
The future of politics is grounded in data, and political analytics in polling is certainly a part of it.
Dr. Doug Usher is a partner at Forbes Tate Partners. He has spent the past two decades building insights that have helped change the strategic trajectory of major corporations, industry associations, and political campaigns, combining deep expertise in opinion research, data analysis, and analytics with years of experience navigating the intersection between business goals and the political, policy, and regulatory spheres. He holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in government and research methodology.
Learn more about the new Columbia University M.S. in Political Analytics program. Application priority deadline: February 15, 2023. The final application deadline is June 15, 2023. The 36-credit program is available part-time and full-time.
For general information and admissions questions, please call 212-854-9666 or email politicalanalytics [[at]] sps [[dot]] columbia [[dot]] edu.
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