Gallup may resume polling Thursday after halting its operations Sunday before super-storm Sandy tore into the Northeast.
The decision of whether to start polling again in certain states and whether to publish any results is still up in the air, says Frank Newport. The decision will depend largely on response rates over the next 24 hours.
“We have lots of area codes which we think are affected in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut, and [we have] the history of those area codes compared to other parts of the states,” Newport told
Politico.
“We’re doing some testing tonight [Wednesday]. We’re going to look at it tomorrow to see if we should go ahead.”
He wrote on Gallup’s website Wednesday that its pollsters believe Sandy “compromised the ability of a national survey to provide a nationally representative assessment of the nation’s voting population.”
The polling agency has tentative plans to contact people Thursday through Sunday for final pre-election polls. “The decisions we make on the validity of the sample and the analysis of the data that results will be carefully informed by the degree of recovery from the storm over the period of the survey,” Newport wrote.
Mitt Romney led President Barack Obama 51 to 46 percent in Gallup’s last national poll, conducted Oct. 22-28.
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