Once upon a time, people had phones hard-wired in their houses. These phones were called “landlines,” and they relied on wires strung throughout their communities to operate. It was an effective technology, but one that necessarily meant that your ability to place and receive a telephone call was limited to […] Read more »
Poll Hub: The Pollsters Strike Back
In this episode of Poll Hub, the brain trust of The Marist Poll shares its poll watcher’s checklist for the 2018 midterm elections for United States Congress. What can pollsters and media pundits do to prevent the public from being pointed in the wrong direction? Stay tuned. Marist Poll Read more »
Is polling dead (or dying)?
On Wednesday, the best known polling organization in the world made a big change. Gallup announced that it would no longer be doing a daily presidential approval tracking poll. “Beginning in 2018, Gallup will start updating presidential job approval on a weekly basis, rather than on a daily basis,” wrote […] Read more »
How trustworthy are the polls, more than a year after the 2016 election?
Over the past year, political professionals have been picking over the pre-election polling data to figure out whether the polls failed to predict Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton. In many people’s minds, the polls were flat wrong in 2016. Actually, it’s more complicated than that. … After interviewing […] Read more »
What Are the Best Incentives for Web Surveys?
… Gallup and other leading survey researchers, some of whom are listed at the bottom of this article, have thoroughly investigated the use of prepaid and post-paid incentives in self-administered mail surveys, finding that relatively small prepaid incentives can significantly improve response rates in these surveys. But researchers know less […] Read more »
19 Things We Learned from the 2016 Election
We can all agree that the presidential election result was a shocker. According to news reports, even the Trump campaign team was stunned to come up a winner. So now seems like a good time to go over various theories floating around in political science and political reporting and see […] Read more »