August is arriving, and we are entering week six of Donald Trump’s rise—first into the double digits, now into first place—in the national polls for the Republican presidential primary race. … The fact that Trump’s very conservative, anti-immigration, militantly anti-establishment, and—most important—angry backers never cared much for the independent and […] Read more »
The polling primary is underway
… Fox News has limited candidate participation in Thursday’s debate to the top 10 candidates according to an average of the five most recent national polls. Here’s the mystery: Fox News has not said which polls it will use for its average, or what is a legitimate survey. Welcome to […] Read more »
Eight Decades of Debate: A brief history of presidential primary clashes
Next week begins what has become a regular presidential primary tradition: the debates. As a way of previewing them, we decided to look back at the history of primary debates. Readers may be surprised to learn that primary debates existed before the advent of televised general election debates in 1960. […] Read more »
Many Republican Polls Are Measuring a Unicorn Electorate
… The first problem with trying to measure the attitudes of a target population of the national Republican primary electorate is that such an electorate does not actually exist in the quite the same way that other electorates do. The presidential nominating process is a dynamic one, with primaries and […] Read more »
Pollsters to Networks: Please Don’t Use Polls to Decide Who Appears on the Debate Stage
Republican presidential hopefuls are closing in on a tight race: not for their party’s nomination, but for the chance to advocate for their party’s nomination during next week’s first 2016 debate. Whether they’ll get that chance depends entirely on how they’ve performed in recent national polls—a metric that some pollsters […] Read more »
Don’t Assess 2016 with Assumptions
A lot of conventional wisdom floating out there about 2016 is grounded more in opinion and assumption than in facts or data. And, as your teacher or mom may have taught you, “assumption makes an A.S.S. out of you and me.” Here are some of the most prevalent and pervasive […] Read more »