Today, SurveyMonkey has teamed up with the interactive data visualization company Tableau and the publication Axios to launch a 2020 Election Data Hub that provides broad access to the public opinion polling about one of the most watched elections of our lifetimes.
Why? Because as a country, we’re writing history—and surveys remain the best way to gauge the feelings that will be driving the facts that will shape our months and years ahead.
With people around the world tuned into the U.S. presidential election, we’re showcasing how American voters are thinking about their choices, dealing with ongoing devastation from the pandemic, managing environmental crises, and confronting fresh challenges in their daily lives.
Our three-pronged partnership combines SurveyMonkey’s vast polling infrastructure, Tableau’s self-service visual analytics platform, and Axios’ incisive storytelling to provide expert analysis and open the door for everyone to explore the data themselves, viewing trends as time goes on, or playing with different cuts by demographics, issue concerns, by vote choice, or by state.
We are surveying at a tremendous volume to make this happen. The initial release of this project includes interviews with more than 650,000 U.S. adults in polls started in June 2020. We’ll surpass a million respondents before Election Day.
Of course, sample size isn’t everything, or even the main thing—but the scale of research matters. The critical debates over racial injustices and disparities and the deeply partisan reaction to the country’s coronavirus response both point to a need to understand how different groups perceive what’s happening and what to do about it.
Polls are a first, crucial step in recognizing these differences. We need to look at how Black, LatinX, and Asian voters see the campaign independently, not bundle them together as “non-white voters.” We need to recognize those with non-binary gender identities, as well as provide critical age and education break-downs among voters. We do all of this by accessing an unmatched pool of respondents on the SurveyMonkey platform.
Expertise matters, too. We’ve been at this for a long-time, and are using scientifically backed, field-tested and improved methodologies to provide solid baseline estimates you yourself can use to understand the voting landscape or modify to make your own predictions about where things might end up on November 3.
Our aim, as ever, is to amplify individual voices and indicate an answer to that most critical of questions in 2020—where do we go from here?
Join us by visiting the SurveyMonkey-Tableau-Axios election hub here: tableau.com/election.
If you’re inspired by what you see, here are a few tools to get you started on a SurveyMonkey-Tableau masterpiece of your own:
