Overview: You need to watch and read the article about polling, and answer the questions in your own unique words. Then explore one of the opinion poll sites and post what you have found, answering the required questions.

Purpose: Political opinion polls play an increasingly significant role in the democratic process.The non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates uses them to determine which candidates can participate in televised debates. Donors use them to figure out which candidate to give money to. And voters, especially undecided ones, are often influenced by them.

At the same time there is a growing body of evidence showing that opinion polls may not always accurately reflect the electorate and sometimes have the tendency to confuse voters more than they help inform them. This project has students examine polling practices.

Begin by watching the video and reading the article in the attached link and answer the following questions in your Discussion Post.

1. What are some motives for conducting a poll?
2. What is a representative sample and why is it important to take a representative sample when taking a poll?
3. Why is question order and asking questions in an unbiased way important? Why should you pay attention to what organization is conducting the poll?
4. What is the sample that was polled? Did you find it representative of the population they are referring to?
5. What is the motive behind this poll?
6. How did they conduct the poll?
7. What is the margin of error reported?
8. With the margin of error, are the results significant or not? Does knowing the margin of error affect the outcome that they are discussing with the poll results?

Explore a variety of polls from one of the following sites and then answer questions 4 through 8.

Websites to Explore (choose one and then choose one poll to describe).

https://fivethirtyeight.com/politics/

https://news.gallup.com/topic/politics.aspx

https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/politics-policy/