Editor’s note: News 8 employs EPIC-MRA for political polling services.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — The polls for the 2024 presidential election are neck-and-neck heading into Election Day. But have you ever wondered how pollsters set up their surveys?
It turns out, polling is an art as much as it is a science. Polling is a combination of math and logic, taking in all sorts of factors to try to deliver the most accurate estimate possible of the electorate.
Bernie Porn has decades of experience in political polling, launching local pollster EPIC-MRA in 1992. He says nothing is more important than obtaining an accurate sample.
“We have a voter file database for the state of Michigan that has all registered voters with vote history — two decades’ worth,” Porn told News 8. “We can pull out those who vote only in presidential elections … and those that vote in lower-level elections, so that when we do a survey for a school district or a local community, we can zero in on the folks who participate in that type of election.
“We also always include new registrants and people who may not have been old enough to have voted in the past, so they have an opportunity to participate.”
The sample formula typically follows the expected electorate. If you want to predict how an election will shape out, your poll should match. If 20% of the voters in the expected turnout are between the ages of 18 and 29, the poll should have 20% of its respondents between the ages of 18 and 29.
Pollsters also look at all sorts of demographics, including age range, race, religion and even things like annual income and education levels.
There are several different kinds of surveys, like opt-in surveys, where opinionated voters reach out to pollsters to share their points of view. Others are conducted by email or even text message, with an expected number of responses. For major polls like ones for the upcoming presidential election, EPIC-MRA prefers live phone calls with human operators.
“The live interviewer survey, we have always found to be most accurate in terms of predicting the outcome of an election,” Porn said. “It’s a little more expensive than other methodologies, but it has been the most accurate for us.”
While math dictates how to design an accurate sample, logic and reason help shape how the survey is conducted.
“It can be just a few minutes for a quick survey. Ours that we do for News 8, as well as our other television clients and the Detroit Free Press, are usually in the 15-minute range,” Porn said. “We try not to ever do a survey that’s more than 20 minutes because you’re going to lose a certain number of participants when you have it that long. You’re going to have to cook dinner or something else. You lose folks.”
Pollsters even factor in the order of certain questions.
“It’s important in drafting the survey to make sure you’re not influencing people by the placement of the question, or a bit of information that might influence how they respond to a question after that,” he said. “The other thing you do is always rotate between the top two partisan candidates for a general election, or if you’re doing a primary survey, you try to rotate all of the candidates so there’s no incidents where you have one favored more than others.”
There are plenty of polls out there. Which ones does Porn pay attention to, in particular? His personal favorite is Stan Greenberg and Democracy Corps.
“He worked with us during the 1980s,” Porn said. “He was also Bill Clinton’s pollster. He was Nelson Mandela’s pollster, Tony Blair’s pollster. Worldwide, he is probably best known for doing polling in a variety of different countries. So I would say he’s the best. But you also have Quinnipiac, ABC, NBC, all of those are rated very highly.”