Trump’s Main November Foe Isn’t Clinton, It’s Demographic Change

To win the White House, Donald Trump may need to turn back the clock and make the American electorate look more like it did in 2004 than in 2012. … So, why are so many polls close right now? One reason: Some pollsters foresee working-class whites making up a larger […] Read more »

Why you should be skeptical of wacky new studies about what sways elections

This has been a rough year for pollsters and pundits, with prediction after prediction going painfully awry. Even those supposedly unflappable data journalists have found themselves stepping in it. But it’s not just the journalists and pollsters. Since I’m a professor of statistics as well as a blogger who often […] Read more »

How Obama will lift Clinton to victory, barely

At the American Political Science Association (APSA) meetings last week in Philadelphia, Charles Tien and I released our presidential election forecast, as did other political science forecasters. We called a narrow win for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, with 51 percent of the popular vote share (the Democratic and Republican total). […] Read more »

Trump Beats Clinton Among Least-Educated Whites in Bloomberg Poll

Donald Trump is decisively winning white voters who don’t have more than a high-school education, but his stubborn unpopularity with minorities has given Hillary Clinton a narrow overall lead with America’s least-educated voters. Those findings from the latest Purple Slice online poll for Bloomberg Politics highlight two of the biggest […] Read more »