… We would always like to make a final poll estimate that is exactly on target with the final popular vote percentage for both candidates. That is the goal. But our estimate (and almost all other national polls at the end), gave a broadly accurate picture of what was, in […] Read more »
The Presidential Polls Were Right After All — But the Argument Continues
In the end, after all the unskewing, the re-weighting and the hand-wringing, the polls were right — for the most part. … But the election also showed the polling industry is still facing increasing challenges related to how the various polls are conducted. The demographics of the country are changing, […] Read more »
YouGov Poll Performance In The 2012 U.S. Elections
YouGov conducted a three wave “megapoll” during the recent U.S. national elections, providing detailed estimates for the national popular vote and Presidential and Senate races in 27 states (a total of 51 contests). As in the 2008 Presidential and 2010 midterm elections, YouGov hit the national vote split with almost […] Read more »
A Vast Left-Wing Competency
… Those who went into the polling business on the left were political consultants, too, but many of them also possessed serious scholarly credentials and had derailed promising academic careers to go into politics. Now that generation—Stan Greenberg, Celinda Lake, Mark Mellman, Diane Feldman, among others—preside over firms that see […] Read more »
Gallup(ing) Away from the Herd
… Now that the exit polls are public, we can assess Gallup’s expectations about a Republican partisan advantage, the lynchpin of Gallup’s lonely prediction that Romney would win the popular vote. … We know that Gallup did not force their likely voter sample to fit a pre-determined distribution of partisan […] Read more »
How Google sees the race
… Harvard’s Seth Stephens-Davidowitz says there’s a better way. Stephens-Davidowitz, a Ph.D. student in economics, uses Google Insights for Search, an online tool for extracting data from the millions of daily Google searches, and then uses statistical tools to analyze the data to gain insights on who is likely to […] Read more »