We’re officially in the part of the primary season where, even if pollsters can’t tell us for certain what will happen in 2020, polling starts to have consequences. …
But despite the importance of the polls, many political junkies — and even some candidates themselves — don’t understand exactly what goes into creating a good election survey, and how difficult it is to do with a degree of accuracy. The basic idea of polling is simple in theory: that you can use a small, representative sample of people to estimate what some larger group — all registered voters, for example — thinks of some issue or election. But in practice, creating high-quality election polling requires navigating a host of thorny problems, including figuring out what the electorate is going to look like, who is going to turn out to vote and the potential impact of late-breaking events. Heading into 2020, the nation’s top pollsters are looking carefully at how to get this right, especially in the context of an unusual election and new rules that govern how some of the most important primary contests function. CONT.
David Byler, Washington Post