Despite the challenges facing pollsters, including declines in landline telephone penetration and in response rates, polling firms generally did a good job of calling the presidential election. National polls just ahead of the election showed President Barack Obama holding a slim lead, and he was ahead by 2.2 percentage points […] Read more »
Exit Polls Can’t Explain Why Obama Won
We all know that President Obama won re-election last night. But why did he win? My colleague Jon Cohn makes a persuasive broad-brush argument, but when I try to identify, from exit poll data, the specific Obama policies that voters ratified, the exercise proves weirdly difficult. [cont.] Timothy Noah, New […] Read more »
Did Mitt Romney’s Conservative Shift Hurt or Help Him in the General Election?
… As Romney turned his eye to the presidency in the mid-2000s, he became more conservative. Journalists and pundits noted the shift at the time, but much of the electorate apparently did not. As John Sides recently showed with an elegant graphic, that’s finally changing: the public’s perception of Romney […] Read more »
Obama Voters Shake GOP Vision of Electorate
It’s easy to understand why some Republicans and pollsters dismissed the idea that the Obama coalition from 2008 would be fired up and ready to go in 2012. Not possible. Not with the unemployment rate at 14.3 percent among blacks, 10 percent among Hispanics, and 11.8 percent among adults under […] Read more »
Gallup(ing) Away from the Herd
… Now that the exit polls are public, we can assess Gallup’s expectations about a Republican partisan advantage, the lynchpin of Gallup’s lonely prediction that Romney would win the popular vote. … We know that Gallup did not force their likely voter sample to fit a pre-determined distribution of partisan […] Read more »
Shifting Voter Support, 2008 to 2012
Which voters’ Presidential preferences changed from 2008 to 2012? That straightforward question is central to making sense of yesterday’s election outcome—and yet it is a deceptively hard question. For example, consider the results from this year’s exit polls. They indicate that Hispanic voters backed President Obama by a margin of […] Read more »