In the midst of the post-convention wave of growing support for Hillary Clinton, a few polls have shown a much closer race. For example, on August 7th, 2016 an ABC/Washington Post telephone poll which collected responses with live interviewers showed Clinton defeating Trump in a head to head matchup by […] Read more »
Polling: Which one should you believe?
… It is unsurprising that poll results can go very wrong in an era when most phone calls are diverted to voice mail, landline usage is on the decline, spam clogs email accounts, and divisive elections split the population into bitterly opposing camps. Human tendencies make polling all the more […] Read more »
Why the USC/L.A. Times tracking poll differs from other surveys
Since July 28, when Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination, she has gained five points in the USC Dornsife/LA Times Daybreak tracking poll of the election. … Typically, polls ask people which candidate they favor or lean toward. Those who say they don’t know or are undecided don’t get factored […] Read more »
The Polls Aren’t Skewed: Trump Really Is Losing Badly
We’ve reached that stage of the campaign. The back-to-school commercials are on the air, and the “unskewing” of polls has begun — the quadrennial exercise in which partisans simply adjust the polls to get results more to their liking, usually with a thin sheen of math-y words to make it […] Read more »
A Favorable Poll for Donald Trump Has a Potential Problem
There’s an interesting new entry in political polling: the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times “Daybreak” poll. It’s different from other surveys because it’s a panel, which means it recontacts the same voters over and over. … But so far, the U.S.C./LAT panel has consistently been far out of step with other […] Read more »
How Today’s Political Polling Works
So far this year, pollsters have put out more than 400 national Presidential general election polls, an average of about two per day; if the 2012 election is any guide, pollsters will be releasing as many as four per day as Election Day nears. While these poll releases are the […] Read more »