Tomorrow night (or more likely Wednesday morning), someone is going to look pretty bad. It might be the pollsters who have continually insisted on using a 2008 model for their polls. Or it will be pollsters like us and other analysts who have criticized the 2008 model as unrealistic and […] Read more »
Video: The art of questionnaire design
Darrell Bricker, Global CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, explains the art of questionnaire design. Read more »
Bill Clinton Is Already a Sure Election-Day Winner
Whoever captures the White House on Nov. 6, the election season produced one clear winner: William Jefferson Clinton. … If the president is defeated he’ll remain a historic figure, the first black president. Much of his legacy, including the health-care bill and financial-regulation overhaul, will be shredded by Republicans. … […] Read more »
Reframing Turnout: Why 2008 Wasn’t As Unique As Many Imagine
The turnout assumptions of pollsters are increasingly under scrutiny, with the polls often showing Democrats with a persistent advantage in party-ID. Many hold that the polls assume an unrealistically high Democratic turnout, mainly based on the assumption that Democratic, young, and minority turnout was anomalously high in 2008 and can’t […] Read more »
‘For Whom Will You Vote?’ May Be Wrong Question
In the vast majority of pre-election polls, likely voters are usually asked, “If the election were held today, for whom would you vote?” That’s the wrong question to ask, says Justin Wolfers, a political economist with the University of Michigan. He’s spent years researching polls, and in a new paper […] Read more »
Why Polling Is Always Political
Serious marketers, innovators and quants can’t find a better — or more controversial — case study in the problems and pathologies of predictive analytics than America’s down-to-the-wire presidential campaign. There’s not a business in the world today that shouldn’t be reexamining their own data-driven marketing research and customers analytic practices […] Read more »