Monitoring Shifts in Presidential Candidates’ Images

Heading into Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary voting, the biggest shift we are monitoring in Americans’ big-picture look at the candidates comes among Democrats. Bernie Sanders’ image is becoming more positive to Democrats across the country by the day, even as Hillary Clinton’s sinks. I’ll get to the data in a […] Read more »

We Thought Marco Rubio Lost The Debate, But New Hampshire Might Think Differently

We here at FiveThirtyEight endorse the conventional wisdom, for a change. Like most other people covering the event, we thought that Marco Rubio had a really bad night in Saturday’s Republican debate, that the three Republican governors (Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich) had a pretty good night, and […] Read more »

Trump Overtakes Cruz in Final Iowa Poll Before Caucuses

Donald Trump has overtaken Ted Cruz in the final days before Iowa’s caucuses, with the fate of the race closely tied to the size of Monday evening’s turnout, especially among evangelical voters and those attending for the first time, a Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll shows. CONT. John McCormick, […] Read more »

Focus Group Reveals Their Big Winner of Tonight’s GOP Debate

According to a focus group of Iowa Republican voters, Marco Rubio was the big winner of tonight’s Fox News-Google GOP debate. The participants nearly unanimously agreed that the most powerful and impactful moment of the debate was when Rubio answered Megyn Kelly’s tough question on illegal immigration and amnesty. CONT. […] Read more »

Faith and the 2016 Campaign

The conventional wisdom in American politics has long been that someone who is not religious cannot be elected president of the United States. Most Americans have consistently said that it is important to them that the president have strong religious beliefs. And a new Pew Research Center survey finds that […] Read more »