Gallup's final 2012 survey showed Mitt Romney leading President Barack Obama by 1 point — 4.9 points off from the final result, in which Obama prevailed by 3.9 points. It also misidentified the winner. | AP Photo Gallup gives up the horse race As pollsters confront unprecedented obstacles, the biggest name in the business backs away.

Gallup has been the country's gold standard for horse-race election polling ever since its legendary founder, George Gallup, predicted Franklin Roosevelt's landslide reelection in 1936.

But after a bruising 2012 cycle, in which its polls were farther off than most of its competitors, Gallup told POLITICO it isn't planning any polls for the presidential primary horse race this cycle. And, even following an internal probe into what went wrong last time around, Gallup won't commit to tracking the general election next year.


It's a stunning move for an organization that built its reputation on predicting the winners of presidential elections. But it comes at a time of unusual tumult in the polling world. Other top-level brands like the nonprofit Pew Research Center have yet to poll the horse race, and still others have expressed concern about the accuracy of polling at a time when fewer people are reachable or willing to talk to pollsters.

Gallup had vowed to examine its methods closely after 2012. And after a lengthy post-mortem, Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport promised to be ready “when the next presidential election” arrived. But so far, Gallup hasn’t been willing to put its methods to the test.

Newport told POLITICO that Gallup has shifted its resources into understanding issues facing voters — and won’t be following the primary horse races, other than asking about how Americans feel about the individual candidates.

“We believe to put our time and money and brainpower into understanding the issues and priorities is where we can most have an impact,” he said.

But it’s a far cry from this time four years ago, when Gallup had already conducted 11 different surveys of Republicans’ presidential preferences.

Its horse-race polls have been missed this time around, because the number of candidates on the Republican side and the ways in which news organizations have attempted to winnow the field for debates have made polls more consequential than they’ve ever been.

“In this case, the problem is both cause and effect,” said Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers professor and the former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. “The difficulty in doing this well has caused major players to not participate. That means there’s even less legitimacy because people who know how to do this right aren’t doing it.”

Gallup's reputation is greater than that of any other polling operation, though its track record was never flawless. It was among the outfits that missed Harry Truman's victory over Thomas Dewey in 1948, but 12 years later it won plaudits for nailing John F. Kennedy's razor-thin win over Richard Nixon.

In 2012, many national polls underestimated President Barack Obama’s standing leading up to election, but Gallup’s failure was especially visible because the Obama campaign had pushed back publicly against Gallup’s surveys. When Gallup, in mid-October of that year, released a poll showing Obama and Mitt Romney tied in the swing states, the Obama campaign — led by Joel Benenson, Obama's lead pollster — went so far as to question Gallup's methodology in a public memorandum.

Gallup’s final survey showed Romney leading Obama by 1 point — 4.9 points off from the final result, in which Obama prevailed by 3.9 points. It also misidentified the winner. That led to a lengthy and expensive effort by Gallup to retool its methodology, a process the pollster described back in 2013 as aimed at the next presidential election.

Gallup concluded that major parts of its methodology — using live interviewers to call land lines and cellphones, while screening out people who hadn't voted in recent elections — were still the preferred means to conduct election polls. That review continued through 2014, when Gallup conducted polls of the national generic congressional ballot for internal use, which Newport and his colleagues “analyzed very carefully,” he said Tuesday.

Newport concedes that, by skipping the horse-race polls, observers won’t be able to judge Gallup’s surveys against an objective result: the election.

“That is certainly one of the advantages that an election provides, and that is an external standard,” he said.

So why hasn’t Gallup weighed in on the state of a race that — judging by cable-television ratings and other metrics — has captivated a large segment of the country?

“We’re looking to see where we can make the best contribution to understanding the election,” Newport said.

“We’re committed to helping the democracy, if I may be so pretentious,” he added.

At this point in 2007, Gallup was updating its primary standings for both parties more than once a month. And as the candidates moved from Iowa through the rest of the early states, Gallup maintained a daily tracking poll for both parties.

Asked whether Gallup plans to skip horse-race polling for the entire 2016 primary process, Newport said, “That’s certainly what we’ve decided to date.”

And Newport also wouldn’t commit to horse-race surveys for the general election. Last cycle, Gallup began constant tracking in April 2012, pausing only during Hurricane Sandy.

“We have not made final decisions on what we are going to do in 2016 yet,” Newport said.

Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center has conducted fewer horse-race polls, though their most recent survey did include an open-ended question asking voters whom they preferred as their party’s nominee for president.

“We had done a pretty good job in 2011-2012,” said Carroll Doherty, director of political research at Pew, whose final poll in 2012 had Obama up by 3 percent. Nonetheless, he said, the organization is putting its resources into other areas this time around.

“We’re not going to track the horse race in the same way we have in the past," Doherty said. "There’s a lot of people doing that, and they do a good job.”

Other pollsters, particularly those working for media outlets, have maintained their horse-race polling pace, however. That’s in large part because of the role the televised debates are playing in the campaign — and the role polls are playing in helping the networks divide the field for those debates.

“We’re doing the exact same number of polls as we did in 2011,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who is part of a bipartisan team that conducts surveys for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal.

But pollsters still lament Gallup’s relative absence this cycle — in large part because of its rich history and extensive archival data.

“We’ve just become so used to having Gallup around that is kind of odd that we’re not seeing them this cycle,” said Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “But I know they are trying to position themselves differently.”

