… The scope of the analytic research enabled it to pick up movements too small for traditional polls to perceive. … For the most part, however, the analytic tables demonstrated how stable the electorate was, and how predictable individual voters could be. Polls from the media and academic institutions may […] Read more »
How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters
… The significance of [Dan] Wagner’s achievement went far beyond his ability to declare winners months before Election Day. His approach amounted to a decisive break with 20th-century tools for tracking public opinion, which revolved around quarantining small samples that could be treated as representative of the whole. Wagner had […] Read more »
Census Bureau considers cost-saving measures
The Census Bureau is studying ways to run a more cost-effective census in 2020, anticipating that a repeat of its 2010 data-collection efforts would lead to unsustainable costs. The options include using online surveys, increasing use of federal administrative records to compile data, using a more targeted approach to address […] Read more »
Not everyone got it all wrong (notes from our analysis of results and thoughts on a path forward)
We’ve heard a lot lately about how wrong Republican polling was in 2012. Some of it was very wrong and even some of our polling was wrong, but it’s not all of it was always wrong and we seem to have been closer to right than many. This post is […] Read more »
Nate Silver says internal polls often mislead; I say: Depends on the pollster
Far be it from lil ole me to disagree with Nate Silver, the polling guru who has gained even more celebrity this cycle because he correctly foretold President Obama’s victory. But Silver, in his latest post criticizes how internal numbers can often mislead the media — and the candidate. Although […] Read more »
Crunching the numbers shows how Obama and Romney were polls apart
… The Obama campaign combined three levels of data to peg the state of the race against Mitt Romney. The campaign conducted aggregated battleground polls for message testing, individual state tracking polls by multiple pollsters to understand where the campaign was standing in each state, and individual state parallel surveys […] Read more »