… For two years, Republicans had been working to correct one of the party’s greatest embarrassments of recent years: the flawed polling that led so many in the party to believe Mitt Romney was on the cusp of victory in 2012. But after dramatically underestimating Democratic turnout in 2012, it […] Read more »
Here’s Proof Some Pollsters Are Putting A Thumb On The Scale
It’s time to stop worrying about outliers and start worrying about inliers. Earlier this year, my colleague Harry Enten documented evidence of pollster “herding” — the tendency of polling firms to produce results that closely match one another, especially toward the end of a campaign. What’s wrong with the polls […] Read more »
Did Asian Americans switch parties overnight? No.
Buried in the blue and red bars of the exit poll results from Tuesday’s midterm elections is an astonishing figure. Asian Americans were nearly evenly split in their voting in congressional races: 50 percent to 49 percent, with a nod to Democrats by the faintest of recordable margins. … Is […] Read more »
Who else had a bad night? Pollsters
The polls were wrong. And so were the predictions about how the polls would be wrong. Instead of being biased against Democrats, who still hoped they could overcome modest deficits in a number of states, the surveys of the 2014 Senate landscape turned out to have significantly underestimated Republicans. CONT. […] Read more »
Why did Republicans outperform the polls?
As election results continue to roll in, the big puzzle of the morning is not why the Republicans won so many Senate seats – as was just noted in the previous Monkey Cage post, The Monkey Cage’s Election Lab did a remarkably good job of predicting this outcome — but […] Read more »
Voters Know Themselves Better Than the Pollsters Do
Yesterday’s elections provide further ammunition for the idea that we should pay less attention to polls of voters’ intentions, and more to polls asking them who they think will win. … Our analysis suggests that surveys of voters’ expectations were, once again, more accurate than the standard survey of voters’ […] Read more »