Global financial markets and European Union leaders heaved a sigh of relief after the first round of the French presidential election last month. And so did professional pollsters. It turns out the polls were not broken in France, as they were said to have been in the American presidential election and the British Brexit vote.
But in truth, France wasn’t a departure. The polls in the United States and Britain generally worked well. As a new report this past week from the American Association for Public Opinion Research pointed out, national surveys in the U.S. campaign “were generally correct and accurate by historical standards.” Although polling faces real challenges, nobody has repealed the laws of statistics: When polling is done well, it continues to produce reliable results. CONT.
Anna Greenberg & Jeremy Rosner (Greenberg Quinlan Rosner), Washington Post