Polls typically ask people which candidate they want to win. But some researchers have come to believe that another question — which candidate they expect to win — produces more meaningful results. When people are asked about their expectations, some may actually give more honest answers about their own voting […] Read more »
Fear-Mongering with Polls on Ebola
Recent polls have arrived at starkly different conclusions about the level of fear among Americans over the Ebola virus. The ABC News/Washington Post poll suggests “broad worries” of an Ebola outbreak in the United States, with more than four in ten Americans personally worried about catching the disease, while a […] Read more »
Complexity makes errors more likely
… The more complex any process is, the more vulnerable it is to error, and over the years, polling has become much more complex. The rise of mobile phones, low turnouts, greater minority participation and a host of other factors have pushed quality pollsters toward ever more sophisticated and complex […] Read more »
Pollsters Say They Follow Ethical Standards, But They Aren’t So Sure About Their Peers
For our second poll of leading U.S. political pollsters, we asked about ethics. The pollsters who answered, even those who asked for anonymity, said they follow basic ethical principles such as not copying others’ work or letting campaigns dictate results. But many held doubts about their peers’ ethics, and about […] Read more »
Republican Pollster, Looking to Senate Races, Reflects on Lessons of 2012
Neil Newhouse had felt the thrill and the agony many times in three decades as a Republican pollster. Nothing matched the hurt of November 2012. Many Republican analysts failed to foresee the success of the Democrats’ 2012 voter ID and mobilization push as a bruised, less-popular Mr. Obama sought a […] Read more »
The Polls Might Be Skewed Against Democrats — Or Republicans
… Nonetheless, we’ve reached a stage in campaign season when Democrats have begun to complain that the polls are biased against them. There’s a long tradition of this sort of “unskewing.” The trailing party will say that its internal polls tell a different story or that its turnout operation will […] Read more »