A sitting president of the United States is usually the person who drives political conversation. Former presidents tend to be an afterthought. But even as we stand more than six months into Joe Biden’s administration, the President is fighting for attention with his predecessor, Donald Trump, to a degree not […] Read more »
Vaccine Hesitancy and U.S. Public Opinion
The percentage of Americans who get a COVID-19 vaccine is directly related to important pandemic outcome metrics — cases, hospitalization and deaths. This, in turn, makes vaccine hesitancy (or vaccine refusal as some now call it) one of the most important public health issues facing the nation. … The more […] Read more »
How Long Can Biden’s Approvals Remain Stable?
We know that midterm elections are almost inevitably referenda on the incumbent president. One way to think about it is that in November of a president’s second (or sixth) year in office, voters go to the polls looking to vote for or against that president and, not finding the name, […] Read more »
Chuck ToddCast: What the NBC/WSJ poll got wrong in 2020 and what we’re doing to fix it
After the election, the bipartisan team of pollsters who conduct the national NBC News poll evaluated the poll and its 10,000 interviews and compared the results with actual voters from states’ voter files. Pollsters Bill McInturff, co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies and Jeff Horwitt, Senior Vice President at Hart Research […] Read more »
Voters favor Biden’s infrastructure plan
Any careful reckoning would conclude that polling on massive, multipart legislative packages is beset by problems. … No voter could possibly know all the policy choices, programs and funding sources contained in these legislative tomes, so they can’t possibly have a real, pre-existing preference for or against them. Yet, we […] Read more »
What the NBC/WSJ poll got wrong in 2020 — and what we are doing to fix it
Political polls of all stripes swung and missed in the 2020 presidential election. In fact, according to a recent American Association for Public Opinion Research report, the cumulative error was the largest in 40 years. That includes the performance of our national NBC News/Wall Street Journal, which showed Joe Biden […] Read more »