Recently NPR reported on the results of two different national polls on the American public’s views toward the new Common Core curriculum. A PDK/Gallup poll, conducted in May and June of this year, showed opposition by almost two-to-one, 60 percent to 33 percent. A poll for a Harvard journal, Education […] Read more »
Two Polls That Highlight the Challenges of Polling
On Monday, SurveyUSA did something unusual for a pollster: It released two polls of Colorado voters on the same day. Despite the similarity in the overall result — both showed the Republican, Cory Gardner, ahead by a slight margin — the differences in how the polls were conducted reveal the […] Read more »
Dems: Don’t trust the polls
Democrats have a new message in the 2014 race for the Senate: Don’t trust the polls. The party is stoking skepticism in the final stretch of the midterm campaign, providing a mirror image of conservative complaints in 2012 about “skewed” polls in the presidential race between President Obama and Republican […] Read more »
Pollsters Predict Greater Polling Error In Midterm Elections
… We wanted to see what the most prolific political pollsters had to say about their work, the election, their industry and where it’s headed. We reached out to 60 of the most active political pollsters in the country, and 26 took our survey. CONT. Carl Bialik, FiveThirtyEight Read more »
Microsoft Begins a Push Into the Polling World
… On Monday, Microsoft is starting a relatively straightforward survey website called Microsoft Prediction Lab, where users can submit their views and predictions regarding politics, sports and other subjects. The more novel part of Microsoft’s plan will come later, though, when Cortana — Microsoft’s answer to Siri — could start […] Read more »
How FiveThirtyEight Calculates Pollster Ratings
… Naturally, we hope the pollster ratings can give you a better basis for understanding the polls as a news consumer. However, discussions about individual polling firms — there are now more than 300 of them in our database — can sometimes miss the point. I’m more interested in the […] Read more »