2025 MAPOR Spring Webinar Series

Political Polling Insights for Survey Professionals: Margins, Metrics, and Methodology

Polling 101: The Who, What, Why, and How of Modern Political Polling?

Friday, April 11th, 1-2pm CT

In this webinar, we will cover the basics of modern political polling. We’ll discuss the types of polls that are often conducted, the methods and modes that are often used, and the unique challenges and opportunities that face the polling industry. We’ll situate political polling in the total survey error framework, assess the overall accuracy of the polling industry in recent years, and discuss nonresponse bias and changes people in the industry have made to address it.

Joy Wilke is the Polling Director at Blue Labs, a progressive data and analytics firm. At Blue Labs, Joy’s team is responsible for survey data collection across the organization, where they work on everything from questionnaire design, sampling, weighting, programming, and budgeting. She’s worked in polling for 13 years, and has previously held polling positions at Civis Analytics, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Gallup Organization. Joy has her Master’s in survey methodology from the University of Michigan, and her PhD in political science from UCLA.

New Measures of Selection Bias for Pre-Election Polling

Friday, April 25th, 12-1 CT

Recent developments in survey statistics have yielded simple, novel measures of the non-ignorable selection bias in estimates of means, proportions, and regression coefficients that may arise due to deviations from ignorable sample selection, where these deviations might be introduced by the sampling mechanism (e.g., non-probability sampling) or survey nonresponse. This webinar will review the computation of these indicators, the data required to compute them, software tools for computing them, and examples of their use and interpretation based on real survey data. An illustration of the use of these measures to assess the selection bias in pre-election polls conducted for the 2020 presidential election will be presented, followed by discussion of the results and suggestions for future research.

Brady T. West is a Research Professor in the Survey Methodology Program, located within the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research on the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (U-M) campus. He earned his PhD from the Michigan Program in Survey and Data Science in 2011. Before that, he received an MA in Applied Statistics from the U-M Statistics Department in 2002, being recognized as an Outstanding First-year Applied Masters student, and a BS in Statistics with Highest Honors and Highest Distinction from the U-M Statistics Department in 2001. His current research interests include the implications of measurement error in auxiliary variables and survey paradata for survey estimation, selection bias in surveys, responsive/adaptive survey design, interviewer effects, and multilevel regression models for clustered and longitudinal data. He is the lead author of a book comparing different statistical software packages in terms of their mixed-effects modeling procedures (Linear Mixed Models: A Practical Guide using Statistical Software, Third Edition, Chapman Hall/CRC Press, 2022), and a second book entitled Applied Survey Data Analysis (with Steven Heeringa and Pat Berglund), the third edition of which will be published by CRC Press in April 2025. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2022.

Webinar 3: Election Polling in the “Blue Wall”: Lessons from Michigan and Wisconsin

Friday, May 2nd 12-1pm CT

Panelists: Emily Swanson (The Associated Press), Charles Franklin (Marquette University) & Barry Burden (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Moderator: Erik Nisbet, Northwestern University

A moderated panel of academic and industry experts will discuss polling performance in key Midwestern states, examining the forces that influenced outcomes and how polling methodology is evolving in these politically pivotal regions.

	Emily Swanson is director of public opinion research at the Associated Press, where she directs AP’s polling team and election night decision desk. The decision desk analyzes vote returns, historical data, and the results of AP VoteCast, AP’s pioneering election research survey, to determine when AP officially calls the winner in elections across the country and explains to the world how we know. Swanson played a key part in the development of AP VoteCast. She also oversees polls conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
	Charles Franklin (Ph.D, Political Science)  is Professor of Law and Public Policy at Marquette Law School, where he directed the Marquette Law School Poll, ranked 2nd of over 500 pollsters nationally by Nate Silver.  Prior to Marquette Law School was Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin Madison for 22 years before leaving to join the Marquette Law School in 2012. He is past president of the Society for Political Methodology and an elected Fellow of the Society. From 2002 to 2020 he was a member of the ABC News election night Decision Desk.
	Barry Burden (Ph.D., Political Science) is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Elections Research Center, and the Lyons Family Chair in Electoral Politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Burden’s research and teaching focus on U.S. elections, political parties, public opinion, representation, and the U.S. Congress. His recent research examines aspects of election administration and voter participation. Burden earned his Ph.D. at The Ohio State University and was a faculty member at Harvard University before joining UW-Madison in 2006.