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International Journal of Public Opinion Research Advance Access originally published online on March 3, 2006
International Journal of Public Opinion Research 2007 19(1):74-88; doi:10.1093/ijpor/edl001
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The World Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved.

The Horse Race: What Polls Reveal as the Election Campaign Unfolds

Christopher Wlezien and Robert S. Erikson

Address correspondence to Christopher Wlezien, Department of Political Science, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, 19122–6089, USA. E-mail: Wlezien@temple.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The horse race of election campaigns is of great interest to scholars of public opinion and the public itself (Iyengar, Norpoth, & Hahn, 2004). In almost every democratic country, pollsters regularly ask samples of the public about their choices in the next election. The practice now is so common in some countries that hardly a day passes during the official campaign without encountering results of new polls, often from multiple organizations. In these so-called trial-heat polls, citizens typically are asked about how they would vote ‘if the election were held tomorrow.’ Although we now have many polls, they give only imperfect readings of electoral preferences—poll results consist of true preferences plus survey error. Part of the error is simple sampling error, which is well-known. There also is error owing to the different methodologies that different survey organizations employ, however. Results may differ across survey houses due to differences in . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   DISENTANGLING PREFERENCES
 

   THE POLLS IN 2000
 

   WHAT THE POLLS REVEAL ABOUT PREFERENCES
 

   WHAT POLLS REVEAL AS THE CAMPAIGN UNFOLDS
 

   CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION
 

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