An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a poll or a survey, is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence intervals. A person who conducts polls is referred to as a pollster.
An election exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. A similar poll conducted before actual voters have voted is called an entrance poll. Pollsters – usually private companies working for newspapers or broadcasters – conduct exit polls to gain an early indication as to how an election has turned out, as in many elections the actual result may take hours or even months to count.
This article provides a list of scientific, nationwide public opinion polls that were conducted relating to the 2008 United States presidential election.
Scott William Rasmussen is an American public opinion pollster and political analyst. He previously produced the ScottRasmussen.com Daily Tracking Poll, a gauge of American voters' political sentiment. He is editor-at-large for Ballotpedia, where he writes the Number of the Day Feature, and is a host for the podcast entitled "Just the Polls," a podcast series from Just the News.
SurveyUSA is a polling firm in the United States. It conducts market research for corporations and interest groups, but is best known for conducting opinion polls for various political offices and questions. SurveyUSA conducts these opinion polls under contract by over 50 television stations . The difference between SurveyUSA and other telephone polling firms is twofold. First, SurveyUSA does not use live call center employees, but an automated system. Taped questions are asked of the respondent by a professional announcer, and the respondent is invited to press a button on their touch tone telephone or record a message at a prompt designating their selection. Secondly, SurveyUSA uses more concise language, especially for ballot propositions, than competitors. This can lead to diverging results, such as for California Proposition 76, where one version of the SurveyUSA question with a one sentence description, polled significantly differently compared to another version with a three sentence description.
Rasmussen Reports is an American conservative polling company founded in 2003. The company engages in political commentary and the collection, publication, and distribution of public opinion polling information. Rasmussen Reports conducts nightly tracking, at national and state levels, of elections, politics, current events, consumer confidence, business topics, and the United States president's job approval ratings.
The Bradley effect is a theory concerning observed discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in some United States government elections where a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other. The theory proposes that some white voters who intend to vote for the white candidate would nonetheless tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for the non-white candidate. It was named after Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to California attorney general George Deukmejian, a white person, despite Bradley being ahead in voter polls going into the elections.
FiveThirtyEight, sometimes rendered as 538, is an American website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging in the United States. The website, which takes its name from the number of electors in the United States electoral college, was founded on March 7, 2008, as a polling aggregation website with a blog created by analyst Nate Silver. In August 2010, the blog became a licensed feature of The New York Times online and renamed FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus.
Global Strategy Group, often known by its initials GSG or simply as Global, is an American public relations and research firm. Founded in New York City in 1995, GSG has been described in the New York Times as a “a well-known Democratic consulting firm” and a “ubiquitous presence in New York’s circles of power”.
The Quinnipiac University Poll is a public opinion polling center based at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. It surveys public opinion in Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and nationally. The poll is unaffiliated with any academic department at the school and is run by Quinnipiac's public relations department.
Public Policy Polling (PPP) is an American polling firm affiliated with the Democratic Party. Founded in 2001 by businessman Dean Debnam, the firm is based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Debnam currently serves as president and CEO of PPP, while Tom Jensen serves as the firm's director.
The Monmouth University Polling Institute is a public opinion research institute located on the Monmouth University campus in West Long Branch, New Jersey. The Polling Institute was established in 2005, and since its establishment has been led by director Patrick Murray.
Morning Consult is a global decision intelligence company established in 2014. It was named one of the fastest growing technology companies in North America by Deloitte in both 2018 and 2019 and was valued at more than one billion dollars in June 2021. The company specializes in online survey research technology and has offices in Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Voter segments in political polling in the United States consist of all adults, registered voters, and likely voters.
The Suffolk University Political Research Center is an opinion polling center at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Mainstreet Research is a Canadian market research and polling firm with headquarters in Toronto, and offices in Montreal and Ottawa. The company was founded in 2010 by Quito Maggi, who currently serves as its president.
American Research Group, Incorporated is a U.S. opinion polling and marketing research company based in Manchester, New Hampshire, and founded in 1985. The president is Lafell Dickinson Bennett, known as Dick Bennett, who was the pollster for presidential candidate John B. Anderson in 1980.
J. Ann Selzer is an American political pollster who is the president of the Des Moines, Iowa-based polling firm Selzer & Company, which she founded in 1996. Her polls of Iowa voters have a reputation for being highly accurate, based on their performance in major elections from 2008 through 2020. She has been described as "the best pollster in politics" by Clare Malone of FiveThirtyEight, which also gives Selzer & Company a rare A+ grade for accuracy.
The Trafalgar Group is an opinion polling and survey company founded by Robert Cahaly and based in Atlanta, Georgia. It first publicly released polls in 2016, and it successfully predicted the result of the 2016 presidential election. Trafalgar Group was rated the second most accurate pollster on the 2020 presidential election election by FiveThirtyEight.
