Why & How Pollsters Weight

[On the Road]

Pollster strategies for weighting seem to fall into three general categories....

The first involves the classic strategy used by most of the major national media surveys, including CBS/New York Times, ABC/Washington Post,* Gallup/CNN/USA Today, Newsweek, Time, The Pew Foundation and the Annenberg National Election Survey among others. They begin by interviewing randomly selected adults in a random sample of telephone households.... They then typically weight the results to match the estimates provided by the U.S. Census for gender, age, race education and usually by some geographic classification. This weighting eliminates any demographic bias....

The key point is that they weight only by attributes that are fixed at any given moment, easily described by respondents and matched to bulletproof Census estimates using language that typically replicates the Census questions.

Finally, to be clear, none of these organizations weights by party!

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/09/why_how_pollste.html

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Good discussion on a blog I was unaware of.