Leading pollster Gallup will forego tracking the 2016 presidential primary race and, potentially, the general election.
The decades-old polling firm, founded by George Gallup in 1935, has tracked public opinion and presidential election cycles for years in the U.S. This election season, however, Gallup will steer clear of polling the presidential primaries, the Washington Examiner has confirmed.
Gallup’s editor-in-chief Frank Newport hasn’t indicated whether Gallup would resume its tracking of the 2016 race once Republicans and Democrats have selected their nominees. He did note, however, that the polling firm will continue to survey voters’ feelings toward each of the presidential hopefuls.
In 2012, Gallup was criticized by President Obama’s reelection campaign after releasing a poll that showed the president in a dead heat with Republican nominee Mitt Romney in several key battleground states. The firm also found that Romney was ahead of Obama nationally by 49-48 percent in its final election survey.
“None of these factors are large in and of themselves,” Newport wrote in a 2013 report identifying four reasons that led to Gallup’s prediction of a Romney win. “But they are significant enough that we think they made a significant difference in our overall assessment in who was going to win the presidential election last fall.”
Patrick Murray, head of a New Jersey-based polling firm, said Gallup’s absence from presidential primary tracking has been noticed in the polling community.
“We’ve just become so used to having Gallup around that iit s kind of odd that we’re not seeing them this cycle,” Murray was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, a host of other polling firms, including Pew Research Center and Murray’s operation at Monmouth University, will continue to track Republican and Democratic candidates in the presidential primary season.
