Presented By: Michigan Program in Survey and Data Science
MPSDS / JPSM Seminar Series - Partisan Nonresponse All the Way Down
Marc Trussler - Director of Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania’s Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies and a Senior Elections Analyst on the NBC News Decision Desk.
MPSDS / JPSM Seminar Series
MPSDS M3 Series: Mastery, Methodology, Meetups.
October 7, 2026
12:00 - 1:00 pm ET
Institute for Social Research, Room 1070, and via Zoom.
Partisan Nonresponse All the Way Down
Survey weighting and quota sampling assume that the respondents in a demographic cell represent the non-respondents in that cell. Using roughly two million online survey responses across three election cycles together with a same-time, five-firm survey experiment fielded in Spring 2024, we show this assumption does not hold: partisan non-response operates within demographic cells and below them. As a result, demographic weighting cannot remove it; only weighting on partisanship collapses topline variance to sampling error, and even that leaves critical subgroup estimates biased.
Marc Trussler is the Director of Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania’s Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies and a Senior Elections Analyst on the NBC News Decision Desk. He received his PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2019, and has published work on polling methodology, political behavior, and the media.
MPSDS M3 Series: Mastery, Methodology, Meetups.
October 7, 2026
12:00 - 1:00 pm ET
Institute for Social Research, Room 1070, and via Zoom.
Partisan Nonresponse All the Way Down
Survey weighting and quota sampling assume that the respondents in a demographic cell represent the non-respondents in that cell. Using roughly two million online survey responses across three election cycles together with a same-time, five-firm survey experiment fielded in Spring 2024, we show this assumption does not hold: partisan non-response operates within demographic cells and below them. As a result, demographic weighting cannot remove it; only weighting on partisanship collapses topline variance to sampling error, and even that leaves critical subgroup estimates biased.
Marc Trussler is the Director of Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania’s Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies and a Senior Elections Analyst on the NBC News Decision Desk. He received his PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2019, and has published work on polling methodology, political behavior, and the media.
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Livestream Information
ZoomOctober 7, 2026 (Wednesday) 12:00pm
Meeting ID: 95807268556
Meeting Password: 2026
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