The outcome of the 2016 presidential election surprised a lot of people – not least the many political pollsters and analysts covering it. Today the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), the nation’s leading organization of survey researchers, released a long-awaited report that examines polling during last year’s long […] Read more »
An Evaluation of 2016 Election Polls in the U.S.
The 2016 presidential election was a jarring event for polling in the United States. Pre-election polls fueled high-profile predictions that Hillary Clinton’s likelihood of winning the presidency was about 90 percent, with estimates ranging from 71 to over 99 percent. When Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidency […] Read more »
The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election
Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used […] Read more »
On the Power of Being Awful
… Soft data are things like surveys of consumer and business confidence; hard data are things like actual retail sales. Normally these data tell similar stories (which is why the soft data are useful as a sort of early warning system for the coming hard data). Since the 2016 election, […] Read more »
Bret Stephens and Climate Change
The former Wall Street Journal writer Bret Stephens has a column today to kick off his new digs at the New York Times that meanders into climate change territory and has raised some hackles. In the piece, he talks about how public opinion on climate change is soft, which some […] Read more »
Media Polling, M&A Polling and President Trump’s Ratings
At the time of this writing the “unbiased” and “non-partisan” media polls are claiming that President Trump has the “lowest” approval rating for any President this early in their tenure with a Real Clear Politics average of recent media polls of only 42% approve to 52% disapprove. However, unlike partisan […] Read more »