poll-of-pollsters

Poll of Pollsters

This folder contains the responses from pollsters to FiveThirtyEight's seven polls of professional political pollsters, as described in these articles:

• Pollsters Predict Greater Polling Error In Midterm Elections
• Pollsters Say They Follow Ethical Standards, But They Aren’t So Sure About Their Peers
• Even Pollsters Don’t Know All The Details Of How Their Polls Are Made
• Most Pollsters We Surveyed Say Polling Did Well This Year
• Most Pollsters Say Their Reputations Have Worsened
• Iowa Teaches Pollsters To Poll Until The End
• Top Pollsters Expect Clinton To Win

We sent out the first poll starting Wed. Sept. 24, 2014, and 26 pollsters responded by deadline. We sent out the second poll starting Sunday, Oct. 12, and 24 pollsters responded by deadline. We sent out the third poll starting Friday, Oct. 24, and 26 pollsters responded by deadline. We sent out the fourth poll starting Wednesday, Nov. 5, and 17 pollsters responded by deadline. We sent out the fifth poll starting Friday, Dec. 11, 2015, and 26 pollsters responded by deadline. We sent out the sixth poll starting Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2016, and eight pollsters responded by deadline. We sent out the seventh poll starting Saturday, Oct. 8, 2016, and 33 pollsters responded by deadline.

Respondents include commercial and academic pollsters who identify their polling organizations as liberal, nonpartisan or conservative. Some poll online, some by phone, some both. Some answers have been edited, primarily for spelling, grammar, style and to protect anonymity, when requested.

The responses are broken up into two files for each poll.

The first file has a name like poll-of-pollsters.tsv:

This tab-separated file contains the names of the respondents, their polling organizations, and those responses that they have agreed can be attributed to them. The heading of each column contains a question, and below it, in each row the answer given by the pollster listed in that row. Empty fields either mean the pollster didn't answer that question, or didn't wish to have the answer attributed.

The second file has a name like poll-of-pollsters-anonymous-answers.tsv:

This tab-separated file contains those responses that pollsters didn't want attributed to them. The heading of each column contains a question, and below it, the responses to that question, in alphabetical order. That means that each row doesn’t correspond to any one respondent. For example, the answer in the fourth row, in the third column, wasn't necessarily given by the same respondent as the rest of the answers in the fourth row. This sorting step was taken to better protect anonymity, by making it harder to figure out who gave which answer.

Files