Many of the nation’s top pollsters are gathered here this weekend — grappling with the significant changes in their industry, and how those shifts might impact their ability to survey voters accurately ahead of the most closely followed election in modern history. So for this week’s “5 Numbers” feature — […] Read more »
Pew Research: YouGov consistently outperforms competitors on accuracy
… There is nothing sacrosanct about demographics. These are convenient variables to weight by since there are official statistics (sometimes misleadingly referred to as “the Census”) available on many demographics. However, you can weight on anything, so long as its distribution is known. … It has long been known that […] Read more »
How Many People Support Trump but Don’t Want to Admit It?
… There is also strong evidence that most traditional public opinion surveys inadvertently hide a segment of Trump’s supporters. Many voters are reluctant to admit to a live interviewer that they back a candidate who has adopted such divisive positions. In matchups between Trump and Hillary Clinton, Trump does much […] Read more »
YouGov’s accurate election polls show our new methods are working
A year ago the polls got the general election wrong. This week YouGov was the only company to carry out polls for all three of the London, Scottish and Welsh votes. Following both our own internal investigation and the British Polling Council enquiry, we have changed our sampling so as […] Read more »
Evaluating Online Nonprobability Surveys
As the costs and nonresponse rates of traditional, probability-based surveys seem to grow each year, the advantages of online surveys are obvious – they are fast and cheap, and the technology is pervasive. There is, however, one fundamental problem: There is no comprehensive sampling frame for the internet, no way […] Read more »
Gender Considerations Cause Voters to Favor Democratic Candidates
Although Americans routinely tell pollsters they’re ready to elect a woman, it remains an open question whether gender is playing a role in shaping candidate preferences in the 2016 contest. The most recent national survey of registered voters from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind finds evidence that gender does indeed affect […] Read more »