… A new study led by Houshmand Shirani-Mehr and Sharad Goel, assistant professor of management science and engineering, finds that the actual error rates of polls are about twice as high as their reported “margin of error.” CONT. Edmund L. Andrews, Stanford Engineering Magazine Read more »
Poll Hub: High on the Hooey
Why using the theory of social desirability to explain variance in poll results is a flawed argument. Marist Poll Read more »
It’s Time for Pollsters to Report Margins of Error More Honestly
… We’ve all read the disclaimers such as “The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.” My research has found that such statements influence the level of trust readers place in a poll’s results. Unfortunately, their trust is misplaced. A dirty […] Read more »
Are Trump supporters being dishonest with pollsters? Probably not.
This past weekend Marquette University Law School Professor Charles Franklin published an interesting analysis of President Donald Trump’s approval rating. He noted that Trump tends to do better in polls in which there isn’t a live interviewer present. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump (who put together some really good charts) […] Read more »
Trump Losing College-Educated Whites? He Never Won Them in the First Place
After Donald J. Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 presidential election, one data point from the network exit polls jumped out at analysts: his two-point win among college-educated white voters. Many pre-election polls had suggested they would favor Hillary Clinton. And now, more than a year later, polls again show […] Read more »
Are Democrats reluctant to tell pollsters that they approve of Trump?
There’s an idea in polling called the Bradley effect, which posits that polls misjudged Tom Bradley’s 1982 loss in California’s governor’s race because poll respondents were unwilling to admit that they planned to vote against the first black gubernatorial candidate in the state’s history. The idea, in other words, is […] Read more »