SurveyMonkey Fills the Gap as Traditional Political Polls Flounder
After some high-profile failures, pollsters are turning to Web-based surveys to replace traditional telephone polling.
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Still dressed in black from a memorial for their CEO Dave Goldberg, SurveyMonkey executives were confronted with a confounding piece of news. The results of their first big public push into political polling were in -- a long-awaited moment of their beloved CEO -- and they differed wildly from their competitors'.
The credibility of the company, which Goldberg, a high-profile Silicon Valley personality and husband of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, had headed since 2009, was on the line. So was a bigger question: Could Silicon Valley crack the code to calling elections, an undertaking long dominated by major media and data outlets, and one that has become less and less reliable in recent years?