… President Donald Trump pays more public attention to his job approval rating than any recent president in my experience. Unlike Bush, Trump generally doesn’t discount the overall importance of job approval ratings. In fact, Trump’s frequent references to the measure legitimize its importance in his estimation, even as he […] Read more »
Why CBS Battleground Tracker of 2020 Convention Delegates Misleads
CBS’s coverage of the Democratic primary is highly misleading in its estimates of the number of convention delegates that each candidate might win “through Super Tuesday.” Why? CBS’s Battleground Tracker implicitly assumes all voters will cast their ballots at roughly the same time. That is not the case, and it […] Read more »
Beware confirmation bias with the 2020 presidential race
“The next debate is do or die for many Democratic hopefuls.” Andrew Yang “is on fire.” Elizabeth Warren is “surging.” “It’s a three-way race.” I’m betting you can think of a long list of other things you’ve heard on television or read in print to explain what is going on […] Read more »
Here are five questions to ask when analyzing political polls
Not all political polls are created equally. And different surveys sometimes show different results. As the 2020 presidential race kicks into another gear — and with hundreds of different polls expected to be released between now and Election Day — here’s some helpful guidance when examining the horserace numbers. CONT. […] Read more »
Don’t Use General Election Polls To Try To Predict The Primaries
We know we’ve told you that early general election polls are pretty meaningless in predicting who will win the presidency at this point in the election cycle, more than a year in advance, but we were curious: Could they tell us anything about how a candidate might perform in the […] Read more »
No, Trump isn’t Teflon. Scandals lower his approval among Republicans — if they see the news.
President Trump’s time in office has been a roller coaster of startling tweets, controversies and scandals. … Through all this, Trump can seem like Teflon: impervious to scandal. Democrats already dislike him, Republican partisans remain loyal, and Americans’ minds are hard to change. This dynamic can trouble those who believe […] Read more »