Jason Barabas ’93, director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy, is launching The Dartmouth Poll in conjunction with his fall course on election polling, seeking to lock in best practices for polling in New Hampshire.
The aim is to complete two polls for public release before the Nov. 5 election, surveying registered New Hampshire voters on their preferences in the races for president, governor, and the state’s two U.S. House seats. The class may do a post-election survey as well.
Barabas says his goal is to create a high-quality public opinion survey using questions and methods similar to polls fielded by Saint Anselm College, the University of New Hampshire, and The New York Times/Siena College.
“This is an incredible hands-on, data intensive project that has 21st-century technology while adhering to well-established polling standards. We’re going to make use of everything that we can to increase the chances for success,” he says.
The Dartmouth Poll methodology involves sending postcards to tens of thousands of registered New Hampshire voters, selected at random from a list of nearly one million registered voters in the state. The Dartmouth-branded postcard will invite recipients to use a unique registration code to log onto a website where they can take a short survey about the upcoming election and other topics.
In addition to questions about whether the country is headed in the right or wrong direction, poll takers will be asked if they are likely to vote, what they view as the most important issue in the 2024 election, and their preference for president, New Hampshire governor, and U.S. congressional representative.
“The State of New Hampshire poll is our pilot effort. We might expand to other states or nationally, but we’re going to stay within the state at this point,” says Barabas.
In the Election Polling class, cross-listed by the Department of Government, the public policy minor, and the Program in Quantitative Social Science, students will have the opportunity to work in one of four groups.
The analytics group will process the results and tabulate findings. The compliance group will work to ensure that the surveys comply with academic human subject protection rules and adhere to the standards set by the American Association for Public Opinion Research. The strategy group will dig into the numbers, examining subgroup patterns and comparisons with other election polls. And the communications group will prepare news releases and look for the trends and narratives to highlight when the results are made public.
All the groups will have to come together for the final product, Barabas says.
“So you can imagine the would-be journalists, the would-be lawyers, the possible graduate students, the techies, and the political junkies who might be working on campaigns someday, all have an opportunity to jump in,” Barabas says.
Hailey King ’27, an engineering and government double major, says she is grateful for the opportunity to be involved in The Dartmouth Poll.
“Being part of this project and course is particularly exciting because it offers me a rare and valuable perspective on the election process—one that few people get to experience firsthand,” King says. “Contributing to such a critical aspect of the political landscape is both an honor and a privilege, and I am eager to see the results of our efforts and how they shape the broader discourse of the election.”
Voters who fill out the survey will also be asked if they would be willing to take part in a second round of polling, and whether they would be interested in being contacted by a reporter to discuss their perspective.
Barabas hopes that the large sampling pool, Dartmouth’s adherence to the standards of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the nonpartisan origins, and eventually the consistency of the poll over time will win The Dartmouth Poll the rating of a high-quality survey, as defined by The New York Times and other polling organizations, giving the results more weighting in the calculation of aggregate polling data.
“The methods that many election pollsters use these days tend to depart from the old-school, high-quality probability samples,” Barabas says. “Thanks to support from the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth, we will use analytically powerful and innovative techniques. It’s going to be more costly and more time-consuming, but we’re looking to build name recognition as a high-quality nonpartisan poll.”
Because the objective is to get two rounds of polling out before the election—just six weeks away—and since the class met for the first time last week, Barabas has been working with Post-Baccalaureate Fellow Molly Gahagen for more than a month to design the survey and postcards to get the poll in the field. Tens of thousands of survey invitations will be printed and mailed by Dartmouth Printing and Mailing Services, hopefully by the end of September, Barabas says.
As the results come in, Barabas’ students will be monitoring the poll website, processing data, graphically visualizing data, comparing respondents with demographic profiles of the state, analyzing results, and preparing news releases for the media about the results.
“We really tried to frontload the class to get this process moving along as quickly as possible. But I also told the students they will still need to keep up with the readings, and there will be a midterm in the mix along with other course requirements,” Barabas says.
And the students have to remember, he says, when it’s all over, the polling results will not just be reviewed by the professor. They will be out in the public for all to see.
“There are going to be election results, and we may not be near those numbers for various reasons. If so, it’s going to be a public miss, like so many other election polls these days. But that’s OK. We’re going to learn a lot in the process and build from there,” Barabas says.
And to help the class make sense of the election and how the poll did, data journalist Harry Enten ’11 will speak to the class on Nov. 14 when he comes to town as part of Dartmouth’s 2024 Election Speaker Series, which is being sponsored by the Rockefeller Center and Dartmouth Dialogues.
Given New Hampshire’s early positioning in the presidential primaries, students last year enjoyed visits by several candidates as part of Dartmouth’s Path to the Presidency series.
In several prior election cycles, the Rockefeller Center’s Policy Research Shop also conducted what was known as the New Hampshire State of the State Poll via phone calls to voters, a different methodology than Barabas is implementing with The Dartmouth Poll this year.
