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First, a bit of review. The results below give us a sense of the pollster's relative reputations among their colleagues. Needless to say, reputation does not necessarily correlate with accuracy. The surveys of all pollsters -- those with good reputations and bad -- are subject to survey errors, random and otherwise. Even the best pollsters are fallible.
Second a review of our own methodology: Just before Christmas, we sent email out invitations to just over a hundred pollsters. A little less than half (46) responded and completed the entire survey online. Of those, 21 are media pollsters and and 25 campaign pollsters (14 Democrats and 11 Republicans). There is no "margin of error" for these data because they represent nothing more or less than the views of the pollsters that participated. Like the respondents to any survey, we promised to keep their identities confidential.
The questions we asked were the same as for Iowa. We asked: "How reliable do you consider surveys of NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY voters done by each of the following organizations, very reliable, somewhat reliable, not very reliable or not reliable at all?" We also provided an explicit "do not know enough to rate" option for each organization.
In New Hampshire, the pollsters rated most reliable are ABC News/Washington Post (72% reliable), CNN/WMUR/University of New Hampshire (65%), CBS News/New York Times (61%), the Pew Research Center (59%) and the Boston Globe/University of New Hampshire (56%). Keep in mind that the same University of New Hampshire Survey Center partners with both CNN/WMUR and the Boston Globe.
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