With the EU Referendum coming just thirteen months after a General Election in which the predictions were proven so dramatically wrong, pollsters were more cautious about publicising polls over the course of the Referendum campaign. … Predicting Referendum results is even more difficult than predicting General Election results, and estimating […] Read more »
How do people really feel about the economy?
… This post will not tackle the substance of Americans’ worries about the economy but instead highlights a puzzle arising from pollsters’ efforts to quantify those worries. I’ll show that, when Americans are asked specifically about the economy, in an apolitical context, they are for the most part not nearly […] Read more »
How Polling Can Go Wrong
When people complain to me about a poll, it’s usually because they think the demographics are wrong. The pollsters polled too many white people, commenters might say, or too many old people. Or perhaps the sample of Hispanic voters doesn’t seem quite Democratic enough. Most of the time, these comments […] Read more »
Are the polls skewed against Trump?
Is there a pool of voters who are too embarrassed to admit to pollsters they’re voting for Donald Trump? As Trump falls consistently behind Hillary Clinton in general-election polls, his campaign is counting on it. According to one theory — referred to as the “shy Trump voter” — there’s a […] Read more »
EU Referendum: Did the polls all get it wrong again?
While a few of the pollsters got the referendum result almost spot-on, others meant that studying the polls failed to give a clear indication of what the outcome would be on the morning of 24 June. Many people believed that there would be a late shift to Remain in the […] Read more »
The real lesson for the US elections from Brexit — watch the polls!
In the wake of the surprising Brexit vote in the UK, headlines around the globe have declared potential lessons for the US. presidential election—populist movements across the world taking back their countries, an angry working class rejecting the status quo, and Donald Trump at the center of the same sentiments […] Read more »