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One of the conclusions of an AAPOR paper on the 2016 US polls contains this detail:

As this report documents, the national polls in 2016 were quite accurate, while polls in key battleground states showed some large, problematic errors. It is a persistent frustration within polling and the larger survey research community that the profession is judged based on how these often under-budgeted state polls perform relative to the election outcome.

The paper does support a lot of its conclusion with statistics, but there's no actual data about (poll) funding in it. So, is there some other data (in the form of say funding comparisons [which would have to take electorate sizes into account, so not exactly trivial to make fairly], or [better] funding vs accuracy comparisons) supporting this idea that under-funding is a substantial factor affecting the accuracy of US state-level polls?

(N.B. I've also asked this on politics SE, but it doesn't seem to be an interesting question for that audience... and the gist of the question seems suitable here as well, even if it's not a definitive claim as to the [main] cause. So a correlational answer would be quite acceptable.)

Fizz
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    I'm not sure what the reason is to doubt this claim. Of course if you throw enough money at the problem, you can improve poll accuracy (hire more people, poll more people, process data better). – user5341 Aug 06 '18 at 12:31
  • @user5341: sure, more money buys better polls. The interesting claim here is that there wasn't enough money spent (in some places). – Fizz Aug 06 '18 at 12:44
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    State polls are not like State health agencies, they are not run by the state. The polls are conducted by the media companies, the fourth estate that "wields an indirect but significant influence on society". So maybe this paper is saying the business men backing the Democrats didn't spend enough to manipulate people in the fly over states. – daniel Aug 06 '18 at 20:13
  • @daniel publicly released polls are conducted by a variety of organizations. Many of them are not traditional media companies, but rather academic, consulting, and market research organizations. Major political campaigns, however, pay for their own polls. A presidential campaign, for example, doesn't have to manipulate CNN in order to poll the people of Michigan. They just do it themselves. – De Novo Aug 24 '18 at 17:41
  • @DeNovo if a campaign is polling to know they don't have to publish, if they are "polling" as a form of voter manipulation they do publish – daniel Aug 24 '18 at 21:20
  • @daniel i'm not sure what your point is. The claim is that polls of state populations are under-budgeted. Your first comment seems to be about how you think the media controls the polls. Your next comment is about when campaigns release internal poll numbers. What do these comments have to do with the claim? – De Novo Aug 24 '18 at 21:49
  • @DeNovo my point is the public polls of state populations are mostly by companies with vested interests, looking at the actual election results is the way to remove this haze of manipulation. We will probably never see the results of the private polls such as "should I use the word deplorable, which states do I need to do more work in". – daniel Aug 25 '18 at 00:35
  • @Fizz, did you try emailing the author(s)? – Jolta Aug 27 '18 at 13:31
  • Are you asking about the amount of funding available to perform the polling, or the amount of funding into actual election resources, which would make the ability of polling respondents to get out and cast their votes less reliable? – PoloHoleSet Aug 27 '18 at 20:11
  • @PoloHoleSet: I don't quite understand what the 2nd alternative you mention is about. Probably because I don't know the first thing about how these state-level polls are funded. – Fizz Aug 27 '18 at 20:18
  • What I'm talking about is "I'm a likely voter, I will vote for Fizz." - but because of lack of funding resources, my state only has one crappy voting station that I can use, very far away from where I live, with long lines of people waiting in a bad part of town because half of the cheap outdated machines malfunctioning, so I don't get out and vote if there's rain in the forecast, or I don't stick around when I see the lines. I'm asking if you're asking about the poll funding, basically, but that's what I meant by the second part. The poll answer was not as reliable because of other factors. – PoloHoleSet Aug 27 '18 at 20:26
  • @PoloHoleSet: I see your point is that the election/voting itself may be even more underfunded in these states. That would be one way to disprove the quoted statement... as long as there's some way to compare election funding to poll funding across states. – Fizz Aug 27 '18 at 20:43
  • I was less making a point, myself, than making sure I understood that this was not a point you were driving at. Thanks for confirming that you were asking the more straightforward version. – PoloHoleSet Aug 27 '18 at 20:50
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    This seems like it might be a more interesting question for SE.Politics or something, but as far as SE.Skeptics goes, the issue of whether or not polls are "_underfunded_" seems like a matter of opinion. I mean like @user5341 said, you can throw more money at the problem to get better results. And if you don't like the current results, you can very reasonably argue that having spent more money on the polls could've led to better polling results. But whether or not the lack of such increased funding constitutes being "_underfunded_" seems like a matter of policy opinion. – Nat Aug 28 '18 at 05:20
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    On SE.Politics, a good answer might try to do a societal cost/benefit analysis of the expected improvement in polling results leading to increased societal benefits, then lay out an argument for whether or not the expected benefits would be worth the cost. That'd seem factual enough to constitute a non-opinion-based answer for SE.Politics. – Nat Aug 28 '18 at 05:30
  • The wording of the question, and the further comments from you guys bugs me, funding for the polls the paper suggests is privately controlled money. Election polls (why does the world make it so confusing some days) are done by the government, and volunteer poll workers. So newspaper polls = Soros or Murdoch, election polls = actual State – daniel Aug 28 '18 at 12:54

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