THE PANDEMIC has put the spotlight on the classroom, with national and statewide test figures showing that students have lost ground in academic subjects. As schools prepare for the new year, a new survey finds Boston Public School parents also have other concerns, including the emotional well-being and physical safety of their children and the day-to-day basics like getting kids to school on time and having teachers to teach them.

In all, 44 percent say they are “very concerned” about their child’s physical safety, while another 25 percent are “somewhat concerned.” Parents express similar levels of concern about their kids’ emotional well-being (42 percent very concerned, 29 percent somewhat). Black and Asian parents are particularly concerned. Half or more of each are concerned about both emotional health and physical safety. 

Issues of physical safety within BPS schools have grabbed headlines due to several recent serious incidents. But, as Boston state Sen. Nick Collins recently noted, the day-to-day concerns go well beyond these stories. “As we know, young people can’t advance their learning goals and achievement if you can’t feel safe at school. And if you can’t feel safe in school, what’s the point?” asked Collins. “These concerns are not based on hyperbole. My office receives complaints weekly from families concerned about their children’s safety, largely incidents that don’t make the papers.”

Logistical challenges are also causing upheaval for families. Just 31 percent of parents whose children ride the bus to school say the buses were “always on time” the week before the poll was taken, while 24 percent report half or fewer were on time. Black and Latino parents are much more likely to report their kids ride the bus, meaning they are more impacted by this issue. Keeping classrooms fully staffed has been another challenge, with 39 percent of parents saying their children have had substitute teachers at least a few times a month. One-in-ten parents reported their kids had substitute teachers every day.

Academics are also a concern for parents, with only half (51 percent) saying they think their schools are doing enough for students who have fallen behind. While most parents (58 percent) say their children are on track academically, 24 percent say they have fallen behind. A third (33 percent) of parents with a student with an Individualized Education Program (IEP) say their child has fallen behind. Among parents who think their kids are behind, 57 percent think the schools should be doing more to help students catch up.  

Despite all of this, overall satisfaction with BPS remains fairly high, with 32 percent of parents saying they are very satisfied with BPS and 47 percent somewhat satisfied. This is largely in line with previous waves of the survey going back to November 2021. The new figures are according to the latest wave of our series of polls of BPS parents for The Shah Foundation going back to 2021. Earlier waves found modest declines in some measures. 

High satisfaction is not unique to Boston. In general, local schools are seen as doing pretty well, no matter where or when the poll is taken. These satisfaction figures often exist alongside very significant and well documented challenges. In Boston, the city narrowly averted receivership, with Mayor Michelle Wu committing to significant improvements. These are not new issues: problems with BPS go back a long way, and deep into prior administrations. 

But the persistent overall satisfaction can sap momentum for change. If it seems that parents are largely satisfied, there will be less public pressure on the system to address problems that, by the city and state’s own admission, need to be addressed. Political leaders are less likely to take on longstanding and seemingly intractable issues until they are forced to. 

On the bright side, if the opportunity presents itself, parents appear ready to engage. Overwhelmingly, parents say they want to be involved: 82 percent report wanting to be “very engaged” with their children’s education. But only 46 percent say that BPS enables them to be that engaged. Just 28 percent strongly agree their feedback is valued by BPS, and 34 percent strongly agree BPS makes it easy to share concerns. 

 If BPS were to engage more with parents and dig for specific feedback, they may find that parents hold more complex views than the overall satisfaction numbers suggest. Communications are a strong point for BPS in this survey: 50 percdent of parents strongly agree that communications they receive from the district are clear and easy to understand. Using those communications to address parent concerns and share plans for improvement would be a good starting point. 

Steve Koczela is the president of the MassINC Polling Group.

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ON HIS WAY to a landslide victory this week, Charlie Baker did something unusual for a Republican these days. He won urban areas, pulling 55 percent in the state’s 20 largest cities and towns, according to unofficial returns from the AP.

This is not normal fare for our politics here in Massachusetts, or really anywhere these days. Nationally, Republicans earned just 29 percent of the vote in urban areas last week, according to exit polls from Fox News and the AP. Democrats typically need to maintain enormous margins in cities to offset losses elsewhere in more rural areas.

You can’t win most urban areas without a diverse coalition, an impossible task for most Republicans these days. Black and Latino voters, in particular, have rejected most Republican candidates in overwhelming numbers in recent elections. In 2016, President Trump earned just 8 percent support among black voters, and 28 percent among Latinos. This year, Republicans nationally earned similar shares, reflecting the deep polarization of our politics along racial lines.

Baker’s performance in cities was no accident. Courting urban leaders and voters was a major part of his campaign strategy in 2014, and he’s kept at it since his election. His administration’s economic development policy lavished attention and funding on cities, particular cities outside of the greater Boston area. The administration followed through on a 2014 campaign promise and created a grant program focused on urban neighborhoods.  Holyoke benefited from infrastructure and economic developments grants. The administration launched a task force to revitalize Lynn. Lowell and Worcester benefited from research and manufacturing grants.

Baker himself cited his administration’s work in cities as a reason for his success there. “People have seen a lot of us on the ground in their communities and they’ve seen our cabinet in their communities,” he said at a press conference the day after the election in response to a question about his nearly winning Boston and Lawrence. “We’re not strangers to Lawrence. We’re not strangers to Boston. We’re not strangers to Springfield or Worcester or Pittsfield or Fall River and New Bedford and a whole bunch of other communities where the voters were kind enough to turn out on our behalf.”

These urban initiatives helped Baker develop relationships with the mayors and other political leaders in these cities. Alex Morse, Holyoke’s young mayor, testified alongside Baker in support of his economic development bill. Twenty-two mayors endorsed Baker’s reelection bid, including 10 Democrats. Lawrence Mayor Dan Rivera even was featured in Baker campaign TV ads, and Baker came within 60 votes of winning the heavily Latino city.

These programs were part of policies designed to expand economic growth beyond Boston. But these election results suggest they had a political benefit as well. In 2018, Baker went from stemming the blue tide in these cities to swamping them with his own votes. Baker won many of these cities outright, some by double digits.

The warning signs were evident in the primary, when more than 20 percent of Democratic primary voters blanked the governor’s race. Democratic voters came to choose candidates for other races, but showed little interest in replacing Baker. The 22 cities whose mayors endorsed Baker over Gonzalez had an above-average rate of blanked ballots. By campaigning and governing in cities that another Republican might have overlooked, Baker effectively cut off support for a Democratic challenge before the campaign even got underway.

It showed up in the vote totals. In the Democratic powerhouse of Boston, where Mayor Marty Walsh has worked closely with Baker during his first term, the governor and Gonzalez were within a point of one another. In many of the other smaller cities dotting the state, Baker ran up lopsided wins.

In Baker’s case, familiarity with these Democratic strongholds bred Republican votes. It’s a lesson Democrats would do well to learn if they want to end their gubernatorial drought.

Rich Parr is the research director and Steve Koczela is the president of the MassINC Polling Group, a subsidiary of MassINC, which publishes CommonWealth.

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5:19 PM:Where to find us this evening as results come in.

That wraps it up for us here, but the night is just getting started. Steve Koczela will be on WBUR tonight as the races come in, and posting on WBUR.org as key races are called. Got questions? WBUR will be streaming all evening on Facebook Live, and Steve will check in there too. We are also holding a watch party at Lir in Boston’s Back Bay and hope you will join us. Please RSVP here. 

Here is when the polls close, by state, to help you follow along throughout the evening. 

4:55 PM: Boston Turnout Non-Update Update

We are continuing to monitor the day-of turnout figures from the City of Boston, but we don’t have anything new to report. We are continuing to see some discrepancies between the early votes figures and day-of turnout, so we’re holding off on making charts or maps.

Just as an example, areas like the Seaport District now have fewer total votes than the very high totals reported during early voting. Either the early votes have yet to be incorporated in these places, or something was inaccurate in the initial early vote figures.

We don’t want to belabor the point or push too hard to figure out exactly what votes came in when. The Election Department has better things to do today that respond to nerds like us. We are happy to wait until all the votes are counted. Until then, you shouldn’t read anything into the turnout figures you are seeing.

3:37 PM: Blanked ballot questions could mean tougher road for Question 2

Governor Baker’s blank ballot for the presidential contest will get the most press, but voters choosing to skip could have a bigger outcome on the four statewide ballot questions being decided today. If history is a guide, the voters deciding those questions will be from less diverse, more suburban communities than the electorate as a whole. That could spell trouble for Question 2 to expand charter schools.

We looked at the question of blanking ballot questions in some depth for WBUR in 2014. We found that, on average since 2000, 7 percent of voters left ballot questions blank on their ballots. But that 7 percent

is not distributed evenly. Whiter, wealthier communities blanked ballot questions far less often than more diverse, poorer communities. Nowhere is this more true than in the Commonwealth’s Gateway Cities. In Lawrence, from 2002 through 2012, the average blank rate for ballot questions was 16 percent, far higher than the statewide average.

This means that the electorate deciding the ballot questions is going to be whiter and wealthier than the one voting for president today. That probably makes the biggest difference for Question 2, which would expand the number of charter schools in the Commonwealth. We have observed, in our polling for WBUR, a split between white and non-white voters on this issue, with white voters opposed to expanding charters and non-whites more in favor.

Most public polls have shown No leading on Question 2. If non-white voters blank the question at a higher rate than white voters, that will make the Yes side’s attempt at a comeback that much more difficult.

2:35 PM: Blanking the Presidential? Who does that? (Not many.) Governor Baker voted this morning, but he did not vote for president. Baker has been saying for a while he would not support either Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton, and would not cast his ballot for the Libertarian ticket on which his former mentor, Bill Weld, appears as Vice President. 

Gov. Baker is voting bright and early in Swampscott (7 am) tomorrow. Blanking presidential ballot. #mapoli

— Gintautas Dumcius (@gintautasd) November 7, 2016

We may see an uptick in blank presidential ballots this year, given the record high unfavorable ratings of the major party candidates. But for now, Governor Baker joins a slice of the electorate that has been tiny and still shrinking. According to the election data from the Massachusetts Secretary of State, in the 11 presidential since 1972 less than half a million Bay State blank votes have been cast in all of the presidential contests combined. That’s only about 1.3 percent of the all of the ballots cast. The number has declined from a high of 1.95 percent blanks in 1988 to half a percent in 2004 and 2008.

It will be interesting to see whether other voters turned off by the long and nasty campaign follow the Governor’s lead and vote none of the above for president. If so, 2016 will buck a downward historical trend.

2:14 PM: Boston Globe misreads early turnout figures. 

We explained earlier why Boston’s turnout update figures are impossible to interpret (11:21 AM post below). This Boston Globe article  incorrectly reports a drop in turnout since 2012, reading as follows.

“According to the city’s Election Commission, 54,737 people had voted in Boston by 9 a.m., down from 58,854 by the same time in 2012.”

An earlier headline (now changed) emphasized the point, reading “Boston sees dip in voters who reached the polls by 9 a.m.”. As we wrote before, inconsistent processing of early vote ballots makes such comparisons impossible.

1:38 PM: Fundraising totals for Massachusetts ballot questions. 

There are no statewide offices on the ballot in Massachusetts, and the Presidential race is not expected to be a close contest. Most of the political energy in the state this year was directed toward the ballot questions, and really just questions 2 and 4. The chart below shows the fundraising totals on both sides of the four questions.

The over $41 million raised for the contest on Question 2 makes it the most expensive ballot question in OCPF records going back to 2006.

12:40 PM: Why it could be an early night.

The first polls in the battleground states close at 7:00 PM EST. The whole state of Virginia will be closed, all but a few towns in New Hampshire, and most of Florida. Clinton is at least narrowly favored in all three states, according to the latest models. If she wins all three, Trump’s already narrow path to victory all but vanishes.

The polls close in Ohio and North Carolina at 7:30, and Pennsylvania at 8:00. If the early states are close, or if Trump picks off more than just Ohio, it could be a much longer night. 

Nate Cohn at The Upshot has a good summary of how quickly votes are counted in states that matter.

11:21 AM: Bad news, folks: We will not be able to do any projections on Massachusetts turnout today. Our turnout projections are based, at their core, on City of Boston turnout updates, distributed via email at four specific times each Election Day. We look at how many votes have already been cast at each time and use this to project end of day vote counts. This was already going to be complicated by the onset of early voting in Massachusetts, but it now looks like it’s been made impossible by how those early votes are being incorporated into the Election Day totals.

[Freeze frame. Record scratch. You might be wondering how we got here…]

According to the 9:00 AM turnout figures from the City of Boston Elections Department, 54,737 votes had been cast across the city. But it wasn’t clear whether this total included the 47,506 early votes or was in addition to votes cast early. If the former, it would suggest a fairly sluggish turnout so far today; the latter, then turnout would be extremely high. So we asked.  

It turns out the answer is both/maybe, which is where the problem comes in for projections. Sabino Piemonte of the Boston Elections Department explained in an email: “All ballots are being processed at the polls today. So this [9:00 AM] number may include Early Vote, Absentee and regular ballots.”

It’s the may include that makes projecting turnout impossible. The problem is each precinct may be folding in the early votes at their own pace. Some may have processed them first thing in the morning, meaning their 9:00 AM total includes early votes and votes cast today. But others may be putting them off until after the morning rush, or sometime this afternoon, or even the end of the night.

Looking at the precinct by precinct totals in the 9:00 AM update, it appears likely that some have already counted the early vote and some haven’t. But we can’t tell which are which with any confidence. Without knowing, we won’t be able to make any projections (or any maps), because we just don’t know what’s in the figures we’ll be getting from the City throughout the day.

10:22 AM: The 9:00 turnout update showed 54,737 votes had been cast at that hour, or 13.2 percent of the vote. The table from the Boston Elections Department does not make clear whether these figures include early vote. It does not appear that early vote is included in the totals, but we are checking.

9:15 AM: We have been projecting turnout in Boston and statewide since 2013. This year is different. In past elections, it was a fairly straight-line projection from the Boston turnout figures, which come in every 3 hours, up to the citywide and statewide vote totals. With just the vote counts from 9:00 AM, we could make a pretty educated guess as to turnout at the end of the day.

This year, we will be less sure what to make of each vote update. That’s because about 22 percent of registered voters statewide (and 11.5 percent in Boston) have already cast their ballot. The Secretary of State’s office estimates the early vote comprises about a third of the 3 million votes expected to be cast statewide.

But turnout during the early voting period has not been uniform. Early voting has been extremely sparse in some areas, while in others, over half of registered voters have already cast ballots. More to the point, the data on who the 22 percent actually are is very thin, and even the 22 percent figure is ambiguous. Here in Massachusetts, the public has access to a comparatively paltry amount of data on early voting. Other states offer public access to data down to the individual voter level.

Nonetheless, we obtained some turnout figures from our friends at TargetSmart, a national data firm, which offer a glimpse into who has voted, although the data do not appear to cover all early votes. In the TargetSmart data, the town of Eastham was the winner in turnout percent. A call to the town clerk confirmed turnout is already over 50 percent. On the other end of the spectrum, the state’s urban areas cluster at the bottom of the list. What we don’t know for sure is whether voters in urban areas will disproportionately turn out today and make up ground.

Because this is the first year Massachusetts has had early voting, we also don’t have any history to compare with this year’s figures. Based on the TargetSmart data, we can say that early voting appears to have skewed more toward older voters and Democrats, and seems to be heavier in better-off communities. But we can’t say what early turnout of 1 million votes might mean for the final tally, or what it could say about the fate of any of the state’s four ballot questions.

We expect a big part of turnout today will be filling in the map. So the first turnout update will probably feature a lot of voters from places where the early voting is light. We will make some more educated guesses about turnout starting when the 9:00 AM data comes in. But our guesses will be less educated than in the past.

5:00pm, November 7. All day tomorrow we will be live blogging turnout figures from Boston as they come in. Unlike almost everywhere else, the Boston Elections Department gives updates throughout the day on vote counts down to the ward and precinct level. Turnout updates will be at 9:00 AM, noon, 3:00 PM, 6:00 PM, and final vote counts when the polls close at 8:00 PM.

We’ve been doing this since the 2013 Mayoral Elections, but this year there is an added wrinkle: early voting has come to Massachusetts. The city has already published the early vote totals for every precinct in the city, which lets us to make maps like this one:

Overall, 47,506 votes have been cast in Boston already. That’s 19 percent of the total number of votes cast in Boston in the 2012 presidential election and 11.5 percent of the city’s roughly 414,000 voters. But it’s only about half the early vote pace for the entire state, where about 22 percent of all registered voters have already voted, according to Secretary of State Bill Galvin.

One reason that Boston is lagging behind is that its early vote has been uneven. Traditionally vote-heavy parts of the city (West Roxbury, Roslindale, Hyde Park) are behind the pace, trailing even student-heavy Allston-Brighton, which usually underperforms in voting. The heaviest early vote has come from some of the newest residential areas of the city: Downtown and the Seaport District. These neighborhoods have delivered the most raw early votes and seen some of the highest turnout as a percentage of the number of voters registered there. They are also delivering the most votes as a percentage of the total votes cast in 2012, although that may say more to how many more people are living in these parts of the city now than 4 years ago.

Early voting is a work in progress, and the unevenness this year may have something to do with how early voting was administered. City Hall was open for 10 full weekdays of early voting, which was convenient for workers downtown but also residents there. By contrast, West Roxbury, Roslindale and Hyde Park had only a single early polling place each, and those were only open for a single day. Allston-Brighton and Dorchester had multiple polling locations and had pockets of higher turnout around them.

Having so much of the vote already in makes projecting final turnout tricky, as we’ll talk about tomorrow. But we have a lot more that we’ll be covering. We will have updates on the national picture and the ballot questions, and we’ll revisit some evergreen topics that we’ve touched on past years, like how the voters in presidential years differ from those in midterms.

We’ll be up and running bright and early tomorrow morning. In the meantime, enjoy mousing around the maps. We’ll a deeper dive on it tomorrow morning.

The post 2016 Election live-blog appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

DONALD TRUMP SORELY needs to turn in a strong debate performance this weekend. The last two weeks have brought a near-constant stream of bad news for the Republican candidate:

• After the first debate, every scientific poll showed Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by a wide margin.
• Trump made matters worse after the debate by spending the next few days attacking a former Miss Universe Clinton mentioned in the closing minutes of the debate.
• Meanwhile, news reports have dug into his business dealings in Cuba and elsewhere.
• The activities of his charitable foundation have again been called into question.
• The revelation that he lost over $900 million in a single year has raised questions about his business acumen and how much he pays in taxes.

The one recent bright spot for Trump was his running mate Mike Pence winning the vice presidential debate by a narrow margin. But Pence’s win was blunted by post-debate coverage focusing on his inability (or unwillingness) to defend the statements and positions of the top of the ticket. Either way, vice presidential debates typically have little or no impact on the race for the White House.

Polls have reacted to Trump’s struggles, giving Clinton a post-debate bounce both nationally and in most swing states. Depending on the forecast, Clinton is nearing or even over the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the White House. To win, Trump would need to win nearly all the remaining battlegrounds, or even flip a state or two from blue to red.

Trump’s bad stretch comes at an inopportune moment, because time for a course correction is even shorter than it seems. That’s because early voting is already underway in a number of states, with more states starting with each passing week. Estimates suggest around a third of voters will cast their ballots before Election Day this year. Every vote cast now is one fewer Trump could win back if he were to mount a comeback.

Trump is already at a disadvantage in early voting because he lacks the kind of turnout operation the Clinton campaign has up and running in battleground states. Throughout the campaign cycle, Trump has had fewer offices, staffers, and resources dedicated to bringing his voters to the polls. The Clinton campaign’s ground operation, on the other hand, will press their advantage, banking votes ahead of the Election Day push.

All this makes Sunday night that much more important for Trump. Expectations will be low after the first debate, which could work in his favor. The campaign is sending mixed signals about his preparations for the event, which will be a town hall format. Last night Trump did something like that in New Hampshire, but reports from the event indicate it was shorter than Sunday’s debate, and with a largely friendly audience, questions, and moderator (Boston’s own Howie Carr). Trump himself denied it was meant to prepare him for the main event. “They were saying this is practice for Sunday. This isn’t practice,” Trump told the crowd.

Practice or not, the stakes are “yuge” for Trump Sunday night. If he stumbles again, he may have lost his best chance to get back in the race. The third and final debate is 10 days later. That’s 10 days closer to an Election Day that may already be too close for a Trump comeback.

Rich Parr is research director at The MassINC Polling Group.

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CHARLIE BAKER WALKS on water. Earlier this year, National Journal dubbed him “the most popular politician in America,” and he remains close to those lofty heights today. He has a sparkling favorability rating, according to a new poll from The MassINC Polling Group, with 63 percent of Massachusetts voters viewing him favorably, compared to just 10 percent who see him unfavorably.

Baker has maintained popularity while weathering storms both literal and figurative: the snowfall that crippled the MBTA, an early budget crunch, an ongoing opioid epidemic, and the deaths of several children in the care of the state’s Department of Children and Families. All these issues were ongoing before Baker took office, but these new numbers show he is so far escaping blame for their continuation.

Baker has remained popular in part by maintaining an image as a moderate. He has refused to take positions on a number of controversial issues (but not all). He has stayed above the fray of the GOP presidential nomination process and remain focused on his job, although he stirred controversy on Monday by joining other Republican governors (and Democratic New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan) in opposing the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their states.  This has left him with massively positive net favorables across party lines. A whopping 70 percent of unenrolled voters view him favorably, a bit higher even than his standing among Republicans. Even half of Democrats (51 percent) hold a favorable view of him. This may explain why Democrats have been notably reluctant to criticize the governor.

One of the defining issues of Baker’s first year was the failure of the MBTA during this past winter’s record snowfalls. Baker appointed a special panel to review not only the T’s winter performance but operations at the agency generally. The panel recommended a Fiscal Management and Control Board to oversee the T. Winning approval for that board, along with a 3-year exemption for the T from the state’s anti-privatization law, was one Baker’s first political victories.

These steps, and the work of the control board, have also given voters some confidence in Baker’s handling of the issue. Around half (52 percent) approve of his approach, little changed from a July poll. But approval for Baker does not equate to confidence in the T. Only 28 percent think things have gotten better this year. And despite a well-publicized, $84 million winterization program, just 37 percent think the T is prepared to handle another winter like last year’s. In Boston and the inner suburbs, a majority (54 percent) think the T is not ready.

Some of these poor numbers may be the administration’s own doing. Although positive steps have been taken, they are often snowed under by a blizzard of negative headlines of the administration’s own making. Both the governor’s special panel and the new control board have elevated the delivery of bad MBTA news to an art form. Whatever the motive for this naysaying, these stories likely do not help voters’ impressions.

The big question going forward is whether future events such as another disastrous winter performance, or larger-than-expected fare hikes, will begin to leave a mark on the still wildly popular governor.

Steve Koczela is the president and Rich Parr is research director of the MassINC Polling Group, a subsidiary of MassINC, which publishes CommonWealth magazine. Poll numbers in this story come from a poll conducted by the MassINC Polling Group of 500 registered voters in Massachusetts from November 9-12, 2015. Live telephone interviews were conducted via both landline and cell phone using conventional registration-based sampling procedures. The margin of error is 4.4 percentage points at the 95 level of confidence.

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THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION of Public Opinion Research is a rather staid institution. Its annual conference is four days of panel discussions on complex statistical problems in the field. (Sample conference T-shirt slogan: “The Weighting is the Hardest Part.”)  Many association members are researchers and statisticians who conduct important government surveys such as the US Census, or work for major research companies such as Gallup and Pew. It is not a group prone to bomb-throwing.

That’s why it was so surprising when, in August of last year, the association issued a scathing critique of the New York Times and CBS for, among other things, collaborating with the online survey firm YouGov to conduct state-level elections polling. Such online polls use respondents who have “opted-in” to take online surveys, as opposed to polls that utilize more traditional “probability-based” sampling.

An opt-in panel, the association argued, violated the Times’s previously published standards for survey research, which were replaced with a new, more vaguely worded set of standards around the same time the new polls were posted. What’s more, the association’s statement said, “these methods have little grounding in theory and the results can vary widely based on the particular method used.” While the removal of the standards and a perceived lack of transparency on the new methods were arguably key points of the association’s statement, the comments about online polling amounted to “shots fired” in the polling world.

The association’s statement set off a firestorm of criticism. One of the most colorful comments came from Columbia University statistics professor Andrew Gelman, who compared the organization to the “Association of Buggy Whip Manufacturers” criticizing the automobile. The controversy highlights the challenges facing survey researchers as Americans change the way they communicate. The debate also illustrates how fast the field is changing.

Since George Gallup pioneered the field of public polling in the 1930s, the underpinning of survey research has been “probability-based” sampling. A survey can only be said to be representative of a larger population if everyone in that larger population has a chance of being selected to take part. That chance might not be equal for everyone, but if the differences are known, steps can be taken to make the final sample match the overall population. For decades, the practical application of this idea has been to conduct polls by mail, in person, or over the telephone, since most everyone who could be surveyed has an address and a phone number.

No sooner had Al Gore invented the Internet than surveys began sprouting up online. The primary challenge of online surveys has been consistent: There is no way of even attempting to reach everyone on the Internet like there is with phone, snail mail, or door-to-door surveys. Instead, online surveys rely on a pool of respondents who have “opted-in” to participate. Typically, opt-in surveys are sent to the estimated 3 to 5 percent of Americans who have signed up to take some kind of online survey, according to figures produced by Braun Research. In other words, not everyone in the target population has a chance of taking part, only those who have chosen to participate.

And yet, many online surveys seem to be yielding accurate results, despite the fact that they don’t share the theoretical bedrock that telephone surveys have rested on for so long. While the early days of online surveys were a fairly inauspicious collection of catch-as-catch-can sampling, the methodologies are evolving. The survey providers that are now drawing the most attention are working studiously to overcome the barriers set by ditching the assumption that everyone can be reached. SurveyMonkey, the company better known for cheap (or free) do-it-yourself online surveys, conducted experimental political polling during the 2014 election cycle, and has now partnered with NBC for a limited number of surveys. The company’s results were both relatively accurate and free of partisan bias. YouGov, the Times’s partner, conducted pre-election polling in each competitive statewide race and every congressional district. The results were comparable to what other pollsters found.

At the same time, fewer and fewer people are responding to traditional surveys over the telephone. On a good day, with a lot of effort, a pollster can get a response rate of around 10 percent. The low response rate means 90 percent of would-be respondents choose not to take the survey by not answering the phone or refusing to cooperate. The remaining 10 percent, who do opt to participate, are then used to generalize to the entire population.

Truth be told, even a 10 percent response is generous these days. A recent Stanford University survey tried to reach respondents 14 times and still only succeeded in converting 12 percent of targeted respondents. Most political surveys do not include a budget that allows for this many contact attempts, and those that do have such a budget would be well-served to consider when they cross the line from survey to harassment.

Polling traditionalists are grappling with a tough question: Is a phone survey with such a low response rate still a probability survey? It’s easy to see why an online survey is not, since only the 3 to 5 percent of those who sign up for a panel can possibly participate. But on the phone, are those 9 or 10 percent who answer the phone effectively “opting in” in a way similar to the online survey takers? After all, many Americans have caller ID and choose to answer the phone or not. These questions are serious enough to call into question the theoretical superiority of telephone polling over online polling.

This debate is now seeping out from the halls of polling industry conferences as media organizations grapple with how to report on polls and even how to conduct their own. For decades, many news outlets would only report on probability-based polls, and they would certainly only put their own names on probability polls. Times are changing. Practices that used to earn the scarlet U, for “unscientific,” are now accepted and routinely reported by major news outlets. In addition to the Times’s collaboration with YouGov, NBC has partnered with SurveyMonkey. Even the venerable Gallup firm, whose namesake pioneered the use of probability-based sampling for polling in the 1930s, announced in March that it would be doing more online polling.

At the MassINC Polling Group, our elections polling has been conducted via telephone, both because the approach has worked well for us, and for practical reasons. There are not currently enough online polling providers with enough reliable sample and methods to support a large quantity of online polling in Massachusetts. The main purveyor of online election surveys (YouGov) is already working with UMass Amherst. We use online surveys, in some cases, for our non-elections work. But for elections, we still do live-interview telephone surveys and plan to continue to do so.

The truth is, the debate over telephone vs. online is likely irresolvable, since both have virtues and drawbacks. And it doesn’t need to be resolved, since there is clearly room for both and a need for both in today’s media environment. Practitioners of each method are working hard to overcome the challenges they face, whether these are non-responses or the lack of a theoretical foundation. The American Association of Public Opinion Research itself is holding a conference entitled “Reassessing Today’s Survey Methods” later this spring, focused on just this issue.

At the moment, both telephone and online polling seem to be working. Yes, each has its challenges. Even so, as Nate Silver, of ESPN’s FiveThirtytEight blog, writes, “But all of this must be weighed against a stubborn fact:  We have seen no widespread decline in the accuracy of election polls, at least not yet. Despite their challenges, the polls have reflected the outcome of recent presidential, Senate, and gubernatorial general elections reasonably well. If anything, the accuracy of election polls has continued to improve.”

But how can that be? Low response rates call into question the basic theory underlying survey research. And if researchers no longer have the bedrock theory to stand on when explaining why telephone polls work, can they continue to lord them over online surveys as statistically superior? As Columbia’s Gelman notes, “Whether your data come from random-digit dialing, address-based sampling, the Internet, or plain-old knocking on doors, you’ll have to do some adjustment to correct for known differences between sample and population.”

Which is another way of saying no survey data is a perfect representation when it is collected, no matter how hard we close our eyes and pretend. The good news is, despite the flaws in each, there are more methods that work for what we need them to do than ever before.

Steve Koczela is president of the MassINC Polling Group and president of the New England Chapter of the American Association of Public Opinion Research. Rich Parr is research director of the polling group. The opinions in this article are theirs alone.

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BOSTON MAYOR MARTY WALSH and representatives of Boston 2024 have made claims about levels of public support for the idea of a Boston Olympics that are not supported by the numbers. Here are a few:

• Boston 2024 President Dan O’Connell said on WGBH’s Greater Boston, “I’ve sensed […] overwhelming support for pursuing this effort.” O’Connell repeated the claim at the first public presentation of the bid. “We see a strong majority of support for these Games, and we think it will grow as the community process moves forward.”

• A presentation made to high-dollar donors and reported by the Boston Globe claims, “Boston 2024 has strong, and rapidly growing, public support. Polls show more than the majority of the public want the Games to come –including three out of four Bostonians of color.”

• “I’d be willing to bet if you took a poll today, the majority of Bostonians are excited about this bid,” Mayor Walsh said at a press conference after Boston had been announced as the US Olympic Committee’s choice, in response to a question about holding a public referendum on the matter.

• “I’ve seen polling numbers where a majority of Bostonians are in favor of the Olympics, they’re excited about the possibility of the Olympics,” Mayor Walsh told WGBH’s Scrum podcast in December.

None of the public polls, including one done by the MassINC Polling Group for WBUR, have found support levels that fit these descriptions. The four public polls conducted over the last 8 months have found support ranging from 47 percent to 55 percent statewide, and between 50 and 54 percent in the city of Boston. None of these can be reasonably characterized as overwhelming support. Even Boston2024’s own statewide polling, released as a part of the bid documents made public this week, showed 48 percent support statewide. The support figures from their Boston poll have not been released. The poll we conducted for WBUR also looked specifically at the claim that a majority of Bostonians are excited about the bid, and found the number at 48 percent.

The one instance where polls do show high support levels is at the end of the Boston2024 poll, at which point 66 percent say they support the proposal. If current support were at two-thirds, this would indeed match the descriptions outlined above. But this support level is found after a series of questions describing both positive and negative aspects of the Olympics proposal. This is a standard method in a poll trying to understand potential support for a proposal about which respondents have limited initial understanding, or where a campaign might be run with both positive and negative messages about an idea. The idea is to try to approximate the public discourse about something and see how it moves opinion. In this case, this process moves support, which should be encouraging to proponents. But it is potential support, and cannot be used as an approximation for current support.

It is also not comparable to the strong support shown in cities as they were competing for past Olympics, where support often hit levels of 70 to 90 percent. Boston’s comparable number to these high levels of support is somewhere between 48 and 55 percent. Boston may reach a similarly high level of support to these other cities at some point, but to claim that support is already a strong majority in clearly misleading.

And if we are to rely on current support levels from any poll on this issue, public or private, we are around half who are in favor of the proposal. It may be slightly less, may be slightly more. But support is not strong, a strong majority, or rapidly growing, and the majority of Bostonians are not excited by the idea as of now.

Steve Koczela is president and Rich Parr is the research director of the MassINC Polling Group, a subsidiary of MassINC, which publishes CommonWealth.

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To read the headlines in the two Boston papers last week would lead one to think that government salaries are spiraling out of control: “More than 1,000 state employees get pay hiked over $100,000,” blared the Herald. The Globe fronted with the raw number: “Nearly 9,000 state workers earned at least $100,000.” The Herald went on to report that the increase in six-figure salaries represented a “whopping” 15 percent hike over the previous year.

But looking at the entire state payroll — which you can, by downloading the full dataset — tells a less alarming story. Here are two other ways to report the same data:

• This year’s new six-figure earners represent 1.03 percent of the 106,000 or so state employees listed in the database.
• The percentage of state employees making $100,000 or more increased from 7.3 percent to 8.3 percent (see the bar chart).

In fact, the increase in six-figure earners year over year appears to be very close to what one would expect, given current salary distributions. The employees that would be most expected to join the $100,000 club are those making very nearly $100,000 in the previous year. Absent a pay freeze, one would expect normal cost of living, promotions, and other increases to move some number of people over any invisible line, no matter where on the scale it is drawn. So, if there were about 1,100 people making just under $100,000 last year, we would expect the number making more than $100,000 this year to increase by about the same number.

Looking at this year’s figure, it appears that this is indeed the case. Of the 106,000 state employees in the database, 1,125 made between $97,000 and $100,000 in 2013. We can reasonably assume that this is very similar to the number from 2012, meaning that an increase of 1,100 employees now making over $100,000 is about what should be expected. Using the data, we can also estimate that about the same number of employees will join the $100,000 club next year as well.

Now, one could perhaps argue that overall salary levels for Massachusetts state employees are too high, if a comparison to other states led to that conclusion (neither we nor either of the papers attempted such a comparison). One could also argue that overall dollars spent on state payroll should not increase year over year. But since nobody seems to be arguing for a pay freeze, the mere fact of an increase in six-figure earners actually tells us very little about whether the state payroll is appropriate or out of scale.

The lesson here is that context is important when looking at figures such as these. Here’s hoping next year’s crop of stories about the state payroll keep that in mind.

Steve Koczela is the president and Rich Parr is the research director of the MassINC Polling Group.

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In the 2010 special US Senate election, enthusiasm from the nascent Tea Party movement helped propel Scott Brown past Martha Coakley. In the 2013 special election, the Tea Party is nowhere to be found, and Gabriel Gomez isn’t exactly turning over rocks looking for it. To be sure, there is a whiff of Tea Party-style anti-establishmentarianism in Gomez’s plan to “Reboot Congress,” his digs at Markey’s decades-long tenure in Washington, and his Chevy Chase address. But Gomez’s rhetoric about compromise is a far cry from Brown’s defiant promise to be the deciding vote against Obamacare in 2010.

Is Gomez missing an opportunity to rally the conservative base?  Perhaps, but our polling suggests openly courting the Tea Party in Massachusetts would come with a heavier political price this year than in 2010. The political dynamic has fundamentally shifted from 2010, when Brown was able to tap into Tea Party support without risking significant blowback from the unenrolled voters he needed to secure victory. Today, the Tea Party is a known (and largely disliked) quantity in Massachusetts, and by pursuing Tea Party support Gomez risks alienating the unenrolled voters and conservative Democrats he needs to catch Markey.

While not at its nadir (recorded in October 2012, during the presidential race), the Tea Party is far less popular in Massachusetts than it once was. The Tea Party is now seen favorably by just 22 percent of likely voters in the upcoming election, less than half the number who see the group favorably. This represents a sharp downturn from late 2010, when the movement was relatively new and less clearly defined as exclusively conservative.  At that time, slightly more Bay Staters held a favorable view (37 percent) of the Tea Party than unfavorable (35 percent). Among the all-important unenrolled voters, the ratio was 45 percent favorable to 33 percent favorable. In our new poll released this week, just a quarter of unenrolled voters view the Tea Party favorably, a 20 percent drop in just under 3 years.

National polls on the question show a similar trend, and reach back a bit further. The earliest Tea Party poll on pollingreport.com was fielded the week before the Brown-Coakley election. It found a majority of registered voters nationally (58 percent) said they hadn’t heard enough about the Tea Party to form an opinion. With numbers like those, one could make the case that Scott Brown thrust the Tea Party into the national spotlight as much as the other way around.

Of course, ignoring the Tea Party and labeling oneself a new kind of Republican risks turning off other Republicans, and, according to our poll, Gomez may be doing just that. Only 80 percent of Republicans in our most recent poll plan to vote for him, on par with a series of other polls showing the same dynamic. By comparison, both Brown and 2010 gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker carried 90 percent or more of the state’s Republicans in their respective elections.

If Gomez loses, he’ll be criticized by some in his party for failing to engage his base. But the polls suggest he may have little choice but to pursue his current strategy. The Tea Party in 2013 is simply not the Tea Party Scott Brown tapped into in 2010. And absent a groundswell of conservative enthusiasm and simultaneous support from unenrolled voters, it’s unclear how Gomez – or any Republican, including Brown – wins a statewide election in Massachusetts.

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