J. Ann Selzer may be the single most powerful pollster in America. She runs the Des Moines Register’s Iowa poll, the gold standard of survey research in what is the single most-watched state, politically speaking, in the country. So when Selzer’s final numbers in the heated Senate race between state […] Read more »
Getting the Latino vote wrong? Which polls are good and which polls are bad
Is it possible that Colorado’s Cory Gardner is shaping up to be this election cycle’s Sharron Angle? You might recall what happened to Angle in the Nevada Senate race in 2010. Almost every pre-election poll had Angle, the tea-party-supported Republican challenger to Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid, leading the […] Read more »
Are The State Polls Skewed?
… Last month, I examined the possibility that Senate polls could prove to be biased or “skewed” against Democrats. If the polls have even a modest bias against Democrats, the party’s chances of keeping the Senate would be more like 50-50. And if the polls have a more severe anti-Democratic […] Read more »
When It Makes Sense to Question Polls
I wrote an article this week headlined “Why Polls Tend to Undercount Democrats.” Reaction was fierce. A number of readers compared the article’s argument to the “unskewed” polls phenomenon before the 2012 presidential election, when many commentators argued, mainly based on their instinct about the likely composition of the electorate, […] Read more »
Why Polls Tend to Undercount Democrats
Polls show that the Republicans have an advantage in the fight for control of the Senate. They lead in enough states to win control, and they have additional opportunities in North Carolina and New Hampshire to make up for potential upsets. As Election Day nears, Democratic hopes increasingly hinge on […] Read more »
Keeping polls in context
The poll was called “humiliating,” “a whopper for the ages,” a “disgrace” — I said it may have been right, at the time it was done. Five months ago, everyone was talking about Eric Cantor’s errant poll: the one that showed him 34 points ahead, before he lost by 11. […] Read more »