How to Poll Runoff Elections
Abstract
We present a polling strategy to predict and analyze runoff elections using the 2017 French presidential race as an empirical case. This strategy employs rejective probability sampling to identify a small sample of polling stations that is balanced with respect to past election results. We then survey the voters’ candidate evaluations in first-round exit polls. We poststratify the voter sample to first-round election returns to account for nonresponse and coverage issues, and impute missing candidate evaluations to emulate campaign learning. Next, the votes for eliminated competitors are redistributed according to their supporters’ lower-order preferences. Finally, the predictions are validated against official results and other polls. We end with a discussion of the advantages and limitations of this approach.