USA Today teams up with Pew for public opinion polling

The Pew Research Center will replace Gallup as USA Today’s polling partner, the newspaper announced on Tuesday.

The first USA Today-Pew poll will be released this week and will gauge “attitudes toward the agenda facing Congress and the priorities outlined by President Obama in his State of the Union address.”

In January, Gallup and USA Today split up after a 20 year polling relationship.

?According to the Gallup statement, posted on CEO Frank Newport’s blog, the “evolving” worlds of journalism and opinion research provoked the two to reevaluate their relationship.?

The developments come on the heels of a tumultuous year in the world of polling.??

The 2012 election was marked by cries of bias from first one political party and then the other, provoking furious debate over the reliability of data proffered by various polling outlets.?? Republicans said the surveys relied on voter sample sizes that gave too much weight to high Democratic turnout. Even Mitt Romney’s campaign got in the act, arguing pollsters relying on the 2008 turnout to determine the makeup of the 2012 electorate were mistaken. ??Turnout in 2012 ended up similar to 2008, sending President Obama to an easy victory over Romney.??

However, the Obama campaign at one point attacked a Gallup poll that showed Romney holding a 4-percentage-point lead in the swing states over the incumbent. ??Democratic pollster Joel Benenson argued Gallup’s likely-voter screening method “created a bias against groups inclined to support Obama,” and was the reason the candidates were tied among women, traditionally an Obama stronghold.

Gallup was also criticized in mid-October when Obama’s job approval rating spiked, according to its daily tracking survey. The jump seemed to be the result of a shift in the polling outlet’s methodology, in which it increased the proportion of cellphones it surveyed.??

“It’s common,” Newport told The Hill at the time, referring to criticism of polling techniques. “The campaigns have a war room-type mentality, and both campaigns feel the need to quickly jump on any news of any type that could be viewed as negative for their candidate.”?

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