So is this literally a surveymonkey poll they just put up on their website?
Polling is, to put it mildly, in a transition phase.
Given the explosion of social media, the death of land lines, etc "traditional" random digit dialed telephone polling is, if not quite dead, certainly on its last legs.
We're pretty sure something internet based will replace telephone polling, but EXACTLY what that replacement will be is very much a work in progress.
What survey monkey does is a possibility to potentially replace and/or supplement telephone polls.
Survey Monkey is a service that, as most of us know, allows users to upload a list of emails, and get everybody on the list sent an automated internet based survey.
Survey Monkey has thousands of users, and conducts a million+ surveys a week.
"in theory" one could take a small RANDOM selection of the millions of ongoing survey monkey survey takers and then ask them who they are going to vote for.....
If this data was then weighted by age, race, education, gender, geography, etc it would resemble a traditional probability based survey...
This poll, as well as the NBC/Survey monkey poll, try to do what I have outlined above.
I would put the methodology under "experimental", but assuming good quality control it at least has a chance of working.
It overcomes the major concern of most "panel" based internet polls in that it is a (semi) true "random" selection where the person being surveyed did not, at some point "opt in" - at least for the "horse race" part of the survey.
