ABC News/ Washington Post Tracking Polls
Highlights
- Non-partisan political polling requires quick, accurate and secure work.
- Abt provides comprehensive polling services to Washington Post, ABC News.
- Abt’s polls receive an A for accuracy from FiveThirtyEight.com.
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Non-partisan political polling presents unique challenges that demand an experienced team. Media clients, like ABC News and The Washington Post, demand quick-turnaround work to fit today’s rapid news cycle. In addition, this work is subject to a high level of scrutiny. |
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Working with our clients—ABC News and The Washington Post—Abt conducts nationally representative polls of American adults. All monthly polls are conducted via landline and cellular telephones in English and Spanish among a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults. Tracking polls are produced daily over 19 days leading up to Election Day to monitor and predict the outcome. Under a contract with Langer Research Associates, the Abt project team is responsible for sampling, field work, data processing, Spanish language translation, demographic weighting, and trend reporting. |
Abt has been the polling partner for ABC News and The Washington Post since 2011, and we conducted numerous monthly and daily tracking polls in the final run-up to Election Day in 2012 and 2016. Rigorous methodology and transparency have always been a hallmark of all Abt polling work, and the ABC News/Washington Post poll is widely recognized as one of the most respected and accurate public opinion polls. Data collection, weighting, and data delivery maintain consistent protocols following industry best practices set forth by the American Association of Public Opinion Research.
FiveThirtyEight, a site that evaluates the methodology and accuracy of polling organizations, gave Abt an A rating in March 2023 based on 82 polls, one of only two news organizations with more than 50 polls that received an A or higher. Our 3.5 percent margin of error is comparable to the Real Clear Politics average and lower than that of the excellent New York Times/Siena College poll, which is rated A+. Landline respondents account for 25 percent of the total, the same percentage as the New York Times/Siena College poll.
Abt plays a leadership role for the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). Ricki Jarmon, Vice President, Social Science Research and Survey, is serving his third year of a three-year term as Councilor-at-Large on AAPOR’s Executive Council, and he was just elected Associate Secretary-Treasurer. Jarmon, head of the Data Science, Surveys, and Enabling Technologies’ Social Policy group, has more than 30 years of experience in survey research for U.S. government agencies. He oversees Abt’s portfolio of survey and data collection projects and has provided methodological support for more than 100 projects during his tenure with Abt. Jarmon has worked on several key technology initiatives, including “virtual call center” interviewing and the first tablet data collection on the American National Election study.
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