MysteryPollster is Back!

MysteryPollster is back!  

Fifteen years ago, almost to the day, I started posting articles to this site, something we used to call a “blog.” That was before Charles Franklin, Doug Rivers and I started Pollster.com, before Pollster moved to The Huffington Post, before I worked for SurveyMonkey. Back then I had a story to tell about how pre-election polls worked, based on two decades of experience gained conducting telephone surveys for Democratic candidates.  

Today, things are very different, for both polling and me. People who follow politics still obsess about the latest polls, but the way we conduct surveys is in the midst of upheaval and reinvention. Many methods honed for the telephone are having to change as surveys move online and pollsters adapt to the difficulty of reaching and interviewing Americans in an era where they increasingly avoid or block unsolicited appeals.  

Polling is in a state of flux, and it’s not clear where it will land. As someone who has been observing, reporting and conducting polls, most recently at the forefront of online survey research at SurveyMonkey — and now my independent consulting via MysteryPollster LLC — it’s a story I’m uniquely positioned to tell. 

As was true 15 years ago, writing for this site is not my day job, so I’m not sure how often I will post updates. The newer and (hopefully) friendlier design of this site is also a work in progress. I’ll add better menus and the like as time allows. Most of the articles you can find in the archives here are ancient and dated, but some hold up well. I’ll try to highlight those.  

I’m relaunching today with a deep dive analysis of differential nonresponse I presented at the 2018 conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Today, FiveThirtyEight also kindly published my summary of that analysis and its implications for the ongoing impeachment story (many thanks to Nate Silver and Micah Cohen).  

But for now, I mostly want to share the news: MysteryPollster is back!