Can polls be trusted? This question is on the minds of seemingly everyone who follows the 2016 campaign, though it is hardly unique to this election cycle. The answer is complicated, thanks to myriad challenges facing polling and the fact that pollsters have reacted to these challenges in disparate ways. […] Read more »
The Rationale Behind the Redesign of the Reuters/Ipsos Presidential Ballot Question
Since early June, our Reuters/Ipsos horse race ballot question (Clinton versus Trump) has shown a larger spread (Clinton-Trump) than the average of the market. Specifically, over this time our poll has given Clinton, on average, a 10-point lead, while that of the market has been narrower at 5-points. So why […] Read more »
Election Update: When To Freak Out About Shocking New Polls
… There’s been a lot of news over the past two weeks — the conclusion to the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s emails and the Dallas shootings of police officers, in particular — and it would be nice to see how the polls settled in after a couple of slow weeks […] Read more »
The Misleading ABC/Washington Post Poll on Hillary Clinton’s Emails
According to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, a majority of Americans disapprove of the FBI’s recommendation not to charge Hillary Clinton with a crime over her handling of emails while she was secretary of state. But the people who designed the poll chose not to ask about the issue […] Read more »
Why Polls on Third-Party Candidates Aren’t Always Accurate
The 2016 presidential race features two unpopular candidates: both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have unprecedentedly low favorability ratings for major-party candidates. The possibility that a large percentage of voters will not vote for either candidate may lead to a serious third-party challenger, something not seen since Ross Perot’s 1992 […] Read more »
Automatic polling using Computational Linguistics: More reliable than traditional polling?
The outcome of the 2016 EU referendum did not only spell disaster for the incumbent prime minister and the Remain campaign. It also amounted to a PR disaster for the commercial pollsters, with YouGov, Populus, ComRes, ORB Ipsos-Mori and Survation all failing to correctly predict the outcome. … By contrast, […] Read more »