• by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, March 11, 2016

Politicians are always polling. The practice is used to assess the viability of potential candidates, while it also helps campaigns define strategy or choose issue point. Polling can also fail miserably to model an electorate, as we saw this week in the Michigan Democratic primary.

Earlier in the campaign season, pollsters were under fire for erroneous predictions throughout 2015. Most polls did not correctly predict election results in the UK, Turkey, Israel and even Canada.

Primary polls have so far been slightly inaccurate on average, but Tuesday’s results in Michigan raised questions again about the polling industry. Including the Michigan results, Democrats have missed polls overall by 8.5 points, compared to an average 6.6 points for the GOP.

In late 2015, Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight wrote a piece titled: “The Future Of Polling May Depend On Donald Trump’s Fate.” If we take that benchmark, polling has been having a pretty good time to date.

Pre-Iowa polls showed Donald Trump with a strong lead over his competitors; those have proved to be accurate, save the upset in Iowa itself.

Significantly, the differences between phone and online polling have been accentuated this cycle.

Two late November polls, one conducted by phone and another online, showed widely different results. A Bloomberg phone poll had Trump at 24% and then-candidate Dr. Ben Carson at 20%. An online Ipsos poll taken that same day, put Trump with a much larger lead at 37% to Carson’s 14%. Similar trends were also seen in live-interview polling.

This illustrates both the aversion toward expressing public support for Trump (an aversion that looks to be waning among Republicans) and difficulties with phone polling as landlines become less ubiquitous, especially among younger voters.

Amid the turbulent polling landscape, Reuters has released a Polling Explorer page that serves as a landing page for the most recent polling information. The poll scores will stay relevant throughout this campaign cycle, but are there more Michigans on the horizon? Bernie Sanders hopes so.