Back in 1962, Elmo Roper, a pioneer in public opinion polling, identified a problem in his field. “A preference for certainty over doubt, for the plausible over the proved, for drama over accuracy, for hunch and intuition over the hard-to-assemble facts, is a common human tendency,” he wrote. Fifty-five years […] Read more »
Trump’s Low Approval Rating Hurt Republicans Tuesday
Poll Hub: How the polls fared in the Virginia governor’s race
The pre-election polls in Virginia were wildly inconsistent. The disparate methodologies, specifically how samples were selected, muddied the narrative of the gubernatorial contest. As the Poll Hub team explains, the traditional method of conducting live interviews using a Random Digit Dial sampling method proved the most accurate in predicting this […] Read more »
The Fox News Voter Analysis Exit Poll – Not a sterling launch
As reported here this past Monday, Fox News decided to launch its own exit poll for Tuesday’s election, abandoning the media consortium it had worked with since 1998. Called “The Fox News Voter Analysis,” the reported purpose of this new venture was to provide a faster prediction of election outcomes […] Read more »
4 important takeaways from the Virginia governor’s race
Ralph Northam’s convincing victory in last night’s Virginia governor’s race — coupled with Democratic gains in the Virginia state legislature, the party’s victory in the New Jersey governor’s race, a key win in Washington state, and the vote to expand Medicaid in Maine — put a spring in the step […] Read more »
After a Tough 2016, Many Pollsters Haven’t Changed Anything
A year after polls broadly overestimated Hillary Clinton’s strength in the decisive Rust Belt battleground states, top pollsters and analysts across the survey industry have reached a broad near-consensus on many of the causes of error in the 2016 presidential election. But so far, public pollsters — typically run by […] Read more »