Frank Wilkinson: You’ve conducted the famed Iowa Poll, published by the Des Moines Register and rated A+ by FiveThirtyEight, since the 1990s. It’s an Iowa institution. … I actually received an email this week from someone whom I respect a great deal that included the phrase, “polling is broken.” Is […] Read more »
Why the coronavirus numbers are likely to keep getting worse
… The coronavirus outbreak got lost in the news shuffle during the last month because of the election. But just because the media isn’t covering the pandemic at the same level, it doesn’t mean it has gone away. In fact, we’re looking at some of the worst coronavirus numbers in […] Read more »
Mason-Dixon pollster Brad Coker on ‘shy Trump voters,’ polls and the 2020 election
The 2020 presidential election is (mostly) in the books and the political world is once again fiercely debating a familiar question from 2016: What went wrong with public-opinion polls in a number of key battleground states? One poll that came out looking pretty good was the Star Tribune/MPR News/KARE 11 […] Read more »
How Republicans pulled off a big upset and nearly took back the House
There seemed to be one safe bet when it came to the 2020 election results: Democrats would easily hold on to their majority in the House of Representatives. Not only that, but the conventional wisdom held that Democrats would pick up more than the 235 seats they won in the […] Read more »
Probing the Relationship between Social Trust and Vote Choice
A growing theory for polling error in the 2016 and 2020 elections is nonresponse bias along social trust levels. Low social trust Americans have long been underrepresented in surveys, but historically this hasn’t mattered for pre-election polls because social trust was uncorrelated with the outcome of interest in elections — […] Read more »
Understanding how 2020 election polls performed and what it might mean for other kinds of survey work
Taken in the aggregate, preelection polls in the United States pointed to the strong likelihood that Democrat Joe Biden would pick up several states that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 and, in the process, win a popular and electoral vote majority over Republican President Donald Trump. That indeed came to […] Read more »