With the presidential nominees of both major political parties essentially assured, the focus now is on the general election in November. And New Hampshire, although a small state, once again plays a major role.
By Rhianwen Watkins, Granite State News Collaborative
As a so-called “purple state” — New Hampshire’s congressional delegation is made up of all Democrats while Gov. Chris Sununu is governor and the and both houses of the legislature are controlled by Republicans — it’s also a “swing state,” one that could theoretically go either way when Granite Staters join the rest of the country in picking a president in November.
And that’s why local and national pollsters are still measuring the political temperament of New Hampshire, and with multiple sources around the nation conducting polls, it is important to understand how to interpret them, which sources to trust, and how they can have an impact on voters.
Chris Galdieri, a political science professor at Saint Anselm College — whose survey center regularly conducts polls — defines polling as a “measure of the opinions of a large group of people by surveying a smaller segment of that group of people.”
According to Geoffrey Skelley, senior elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight – an organization that aggregates, averages and then analyzes existing polls to look for trends – polling is beneficial because it helps voters understand the views of the people around them on specific issues and gauge how candidates they like or dislike are faring during an election year. Seeing, for example, which candidates are ahead or which ones end up dropping out of a race can sway the way people end up voting, he said.
Galdieri added that polls allow people to understand how others are voting outside of an electoral context. For example, just because one party wins state legislative elections it doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody in the state holds the same positions that party has on all issues.
“Polls can tell you, ‘Okay, opinion is really divided on this issue … or they think this about this issue, but for whatever reason, didn't necessarily vote that way.”
How polling works
One common concern is how pollsters ensure that a sample group in a poll is representative of the population as a whole.
“That is the question that pollsters have been grappling with for the last 10 or 15 years,” said Galdieri.
“By the late 20th, early 21st century, there was a pretty simple way to poll, which was to randomly dial phone numbers. And because basically everybody had a landline telephone, that was a pretty good and reliable way to get a pretty random sample of the population,” he said. “What makes life harder for pollsters these days is, first, that very few people have landline phones. And if they do, they don't answer them.”
Galdieri said smartphones are a barrier to polling because many automatically block unfamiliar numbers or people let them go to voicemail.
John Lappie, professor of politics at Plymouth State University, said another difficulty with calling cellphones is that the area codes don’t always correlate to where the person actually lives.
“If you call a landline and it’s a 603 number, that number is in New Hampshire. If you call a 603 cell number, they might have moved to Florida 10 years ago.”
Lappie added, however, that relying only on answers from landlines can result in an inaccurate representation of the population. “It tends to mean that it’s privileged people in rural areas who only have landlines versus those in urban areas who may just have a cellphone. And it prevents younger people from answering.”
Nowadays, the new go-to option is texting random numbers, emailing people randomly and creating online polls, Lappie said. However, he stressed that polling today is overall a bit less accurate than it was 20 years ago when everyone had a landline and was more open to answering polls.
Interpreting the polls
To Skelley, the most accurate way to interpret polls is to look at an average of many polls as opposed to any single poll alone.
“One poll could be an outlier, or one poll could tell you something that is not really an accurate gauge of the race because, at the end of the day, you're talking about a sampling error and other forms of errors go into any poll, whether it's done by a reputable pollster or not,” Skelley said.
This is the margin of error, Lappie explained. In addition to a margin of error, polls will also use confidence intervals which are another way to show the margin of error in the form of a percentage. The standard used is 95 percent.
Lappie gave a hypothetical example.
“Let's say I pull 1,000 New Hampshire likely voters. In that sample of 1,000, 50 percent support Biden. Now, we can't say that just because 50 percent in the sample support Biden that means that 50 percent of all New Hampshire likely voters support Biden. We didn't ask everybody, we just asked this 1,000,” he said. So, if our margin of error is 3, and in our sample, we know 50 percent supported Biden, we are 95 percent sure that among all New Hampshire likely voters, between 47 and 53 percent support Biden.”
The size of the margin of error is determined by the sample size. Larger sample sizes have lower margins of error and smaller sample sizes have higher margins of error.
According to Galdieri, the most reliable polling centers are neutral ones that do not have stakes in the outcome. These include university polling centers and reputable news outlets that do not carry bias towards any candidates or issues.
On the other hand, Galdieri warned, consider the source when it comes to polls put out by campaigns or interest groups for certain political issues.
“You should be a little bit more skeptical, simply because those groups have a dog in the hunt,” he explained. “They're going to cherry-pick the best possible numbers.”
The Know Your Vote, youth voter guide project was designed, reported and produced by student and young professional journalists from The Clock,The Concord Monitor, The Equinox, Granite State News Collaborative, Keene State College, The Laconia Daily Sun, The Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, Nashua Ink Link and The Presidency and the Press program at Franklin Pierce University. See the full guide at www.collaborativenh.org/know-your-vote.