Mark Sanford is heading off to Washington DC, while pollsters are heading back to their workshops. His victory by 9pt over Elizabeth Colbert Busch in South Carolina’s first district special election was surprisingly large. The last two public polls from Public Policy Polling (PPP) and Red Racing Horses (RRH) had […] Read more »
In Massachusetts, Kids Poll the Darndest Things
The first post-primary poll in next month’s Massachusetts Senate special election was released Thursday, but while the survey carried the name of a prominent Boston university, it wasn’t conducted by the school or its faculty. The automated poll was conducted by a newly-reinstated student group on campus. That didn’t stop […] Read more »
Six Ways to Separate Lies From Statistics
The discovery of a spreadsheet error in an influential study by Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff inevitably raises a troubling question: To what extent can we trust what any researcher claims to be true? The unfortunate reality is that mistakes much more serious than the one committed […] Read more »
The Iraq Sanctions Myth
… The claim that sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children originated in a 1995 letter to The Lancet which, in turn, was based on a Baghdad survey done by Sarah Zaidi and colleagues. After other researchers identified anomalies in the survey data, Zaidi, to her great credit, re-investigated […] Read more »
Spreadsheet Slips Not Economists’ Only Problem
Spreadsheet users, take heart: Even Harvard economists can make what one calls a “stupid mistake.” A 2010 paper’s finding of a dramatic fall in economic growth for countries when their ratio of debt to gross domestic product climbs above 90% was based in part, it emerged this past week, on […] Read more »
Avoiding a Repeat of 2012 GOP Polling Collapse With Adaptive Sampling
… General election polling has historically been accurate because the rates at which different groups in the electorate turn out have been predictable across similar elections. Mid-terms looked a lot like other mid-terms and presidential years looked a lot like presidential years. This all changed over the last three election […] Read more »