Pollsters around the globe are under more scrutiny than ever before. While it will take time to investigate the polls’ strengths and weaknesses in the recent British general election, we now have an excellent summary of their performance in the US election. Last month, the American Association for Public Opinion […] Read more »
Q&A: Pew Research Center’s president on key issues in U.S. polling
Even as the polling industry tries to recover from real and perceived misses in U.S. and European elections in recent years, new studies have provided reassuring news for survey practitioners about the health of polling methodology. In this Q&A, Michael Dimock, president of Pew Research Center, talks about recent developments […] Read more »
UK general election: How we correctly called a hung parliament
As the dust of the general election settles, many commentators are still stating they didn’t see it coming. But we did. By using our unparalleled panel and sophisticated data analytics, we created an election model using an advanced statistical technique called MRP (which stands for multilevel regression with post-stratification). We […] Read more »
Polling Matters podcast: UK GE17 debrief. Breaking down the YouGov model.
This week’s podcast is split into two parts. In part one, Keiran chats with Ben Lauderdale from the LSE. Ben was behind the infamous YouGov model which turned out to be so successful. He explains how the model works, what it tells us about the campaign and British politics more […] Read more »
Why almost all the UK election predictions were wrong
Predictions were confounded again in last week’s election, and this time in the opposite direction from 2015. My forecast, along with almost everyone else’s, proved some way off the mark. The main error was in the national vote shares, rather than translating that into seats, and there was a specific […] Read more »
The polls didn’t predict Trump’s win in 2016, but this technique did
Three facts about polling in the 2016 election are well established by now: The national polls were quite accurate in their estimates of the popular vote. The state polls were spottier. And the media narrative, drawn from electoral college projections vote based on those state polls, was a hot mess. […] Read more »