… After long rejecting online polls as a cheaper alternative, pollsters are thinking again, prompted by SurveyMonkey’s success.
“The field has had a significant change of attitude about this from one of ‘No way’ to ‘Well, let’s take a look,’” says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at Pew, who has been working with SurveyMonkey to better understand the differences with online polls. …
The company’s push into politics began in 2012, when executives noticed the demographics of their users mirrored that of the broader U.S. population. They quietly experimented with their own political polls and accurately predicted the winners of the 2012 presidential elections. At the time, they weren’t quite sure why they were right, but it gave them hope that they could provide an alternative to traditional telephone polls that were failing. CONT.
Tim Higgins, Bloomberg Politics