MAIL SURVEYS FOR ELECTION FORECASTING?AN EVALUATION OF THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH POLL

Because of slow turnaround time and typically low response rates, mail surveys have generally been considered of little value in election forecasting. However, statewide mail surveys conducted by the Columbus Dispatch newspaper since 1980 have made remarkably accurate forecasts of Ohio election outcomes. In comparison to statewide surveys by two other organizations employing conventional telephone interview methods, the mail surveys were consistently more accurate and were generally less susceptible to sources of inaccuracy such as high rolloff and low publicity. The mail survey's advantage is attributable at least in part to larger sample sizes, sampling and response procedures that yielded more representative samples of voters, lack of the need to allocate undecided respondents, and superior questionnaire design. These findings suggest that mail surveys not only may be viable alternatives to telephone surveys but may actually be superior to them under some conditions. FurtherPENNY S. VISSER is a doctoral candidate in the department of psychology at Ohio State University and JON A. KROSNICK is an associate professor in the departments of psychology and political science at Ohio State University. JESSE MARQUETTE iS a professor of political science and director of the Survey Research Center at the University of Akron. MICHAEL CURTIN iS the editor of the Columbus Dispatch. This research was supported by grant SBR-9503822 from the National Science Foundation to Jon A. Krosnick and by grant T32-MH19728-03 from the National Institute of Mental Health, which provided a predoctoral fellowship to Penny S. Visser. We thank Andy Smith and Al Tuchfarber from the University of Cincinnati for providing information on their preelection surveys, and Jim Hunter from the Columbus Dispatch for archival assistance. We also thank Richard Carson, Robert Cameron Mitchell, and Stanley Presser for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Penny S. Visser or Jon A. Krosnick, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, 1885 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210 (E-mail visser.104@osu.edu or krosnick@osu.edu). Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 60:181-227 ? 1996 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research All rights reserved. 0033-362X/96/6002-0015$02.50 This content downloaded from 157.55. 39.174 on Wed, 31 May 2017 18:33:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms 182 Visser, Krosnick, Marquette, and Curtin more, these results demonstrate that surveys with low response rates are not necessarily low in validity. Since their inauspicious beginnings over 150 years ago (Smith 1990), preelection forecasting surveys have undergone tremendous refinement (Field 1983; Frankovic 1992; Gallup 1972; Mann and Orren 1992; Perry 1960, 1979; Rosenstone 1983). Early surveys, such as the straw polls of the Literary Digest magazine, were characterized by haphazard sampling methods that precluded consistently accurate forecasts (Converse 1987; Field 1983; Gallup 1972; Rosenstone 1983; Squire 1988). But by the mid1930s, Gallup, Roper, and Crossley had begun using more scientific sampling techniques to ensure that their respondents accurately represented the electorate. These and other improvements allowed Gallup to forecast the U.S. presidential elections from 1936 to 1956 with an average error of 3.9% (Rosenstone 1983). Further methodological changes in the 1950s and 1960s (Perry 1960, 1979) brought the Gallup forecasts of the national elections from 1960 through 1980 to within an average of 1.6% of the actual election results (Rosenstone 1983). Perhaps the most sweeping change made by Gallup and other preelection survey outfits has been the shift from face-to-face interviewing to telephone interviewing. Of the 430 preelection surveys examined in one recent study, fully 98% interviewed by telephone (Crespi 1988). Telephone interviews are less expensive to conduct than face-to-face interviews, and the former typically achieve higher response rates than most mail surveys, leaving them less vulnerable to nonresponse bias. Furthermore, telephone interviewing can be completed much more quickly than face-to-face and mail surveys, which permits up-to-theminute tracking of candidate support. Despite these presumed improvements in procedures, however, preelection surveys still predict some election results with significant error. In 1980, for example, all four of the major polls underestimated Ronald Reagan's margin of victory over Jimmy Carter, in one case by as much as 9% (Kagay 1992). Similarly, in the 1970 British election, four of the five final polls and 19 out of 20 earlier polls placed the Labor Party in the lead (by an average of 4.3%), whereas the Conservative Party won by 2.4% (Crewe 1992). More recently, last-minute forecasts of the 1993 New Jersey governor's race showed incumbent Jim Florio leading challenger Christine Todd Whitman by as much as 15%, but on Election Day Florio was unseated (Gray 1993). Of course, even in a perfectly executed survey, one would expect some discrepancy between the election forecast and the actual outcome due to sampling error, but the systematic discrepancies cited above cannot be accounted for by sampling error alone. Clearly, there is room for further improvement of preelection survey methodology. This content downloaded from 157.55. 39.174 on Wed, 31 May 2017 18:33:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms Mail Surveys for Election Forecasting? 183 Less clear, though, is how such improvements can best be achieved. In this article, we propose the consideration of self-administered mail surveys for use in election forecasting. We suggest that mail survey methodology, along with scientific sampling techniques and careful questionnaire design, may provide uniquely desirable conditions for accurately forecasting election outcomes. We begin by detailing the methods of preelection mail surveys conducted by the Columbus Dispatch newspaper in Ohio since 1980 and preelection telephone surveys by the University of Cincinnati and the University of Akron. We then compare the accuracy of the polls in forecasting the national and statewide elections every even year from 1980 to 1994 and explore the correlates of forecast accuracy. Finally, we test several possible explanations for the observed differences between the two survey modes.