… The recent successes and failures of pre-election polling invite several questions: Why did the polls get it wrong in some high-profile races? Conversely, how is it that the polls sometimes do so well? Should we be concerned about political biases of pollsters who themselves are part of the educated class? And what can we expect from polling in the future? The focus of the present article, however, is how it is that polls can perform so well, even given all the evident challenges of conducting and interpreting them. CONTINUED — pdf
Andrew Gelman, Columbia University
Note: This article is scheduled to appear in the American Statistical Association’s journal Statistics and Public Policy.
See also: My new article, “Failure and success in political polling and election forecasting” . . . and the tangled yet uninteresting story of how it came to be
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