… Polling isn’t built to be an instrument that correctly identifies the winner in a race that comes down to one or two percentage points. It’s meant to roughly evaluate the views of a population with predictable margins of error. Those margins are reduced when polls are averaged, but we […] Read more »
The Big Question: How Do You Make Polls More Accurate?
Frank Wilkinson: You’ve conducted the famed Iowa Poll, published by the Des Moines Register and rated A+ by FiveThirtyEight, since the 1990s. It’s an Iowa institution. … I actually received an email this week from someone whom I respect a great deal that included the phrase, “polling is broken.” Is […] Read more »
Mason-Dixon pollster Brad Coker on ‘shy Trump voters,’ polls and the 2020 election
The 2020 presidential election is (mostly) in the books and the political world is once again fiercely debating a familiar question from 2016: What went wrong with public-opinion polls in a number of key battleground states? One poll that came out looking pretty good was the Star Tribune/MPR News/KARE 11 […] Read more »
Understanding how 2020 election polls performed and what it might mean for other kinds of survey work
Taken in the aggregate, preelection polls in the United States pointed to the strong likelihood that Democrat Joe Biden would pick up several states that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 and, in the process, win a popular and electoral vote majority over Republican President Donald Trump. That indeed came to […] Read more »
2020 Post Election Poll Analysis of an Election Like No Other
As we have done, every two years in federal elections, since 1994, we once again conducted a post-election poll of 1,000 actual voters online who either voted early or on election day. The survey had an accuracy of +/- 3.1% at a 95% confidence interval. The voters were interviewed on […] Read more »
Why did the polls undercount Trump voters?
… After studying 2016 election polling, the American Association for Public Opinion Research reported that it found no evidence of “shy” Trump voters. More recent studies challenged that, suggesting such voters might exist. Survey firms that correctly predicted the 2016 election have argued that they did so because of how […] Read more »