Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 17 percentage points in the race for California’s 55 electoral votes, down from 24 points in July, while Kamala Harris has expanded her lead over Loretta Sanchez in the U.S. Senate race to 22 percentage points, up from 15 points in the same time […] Read more »
Presidential approval a stronger indicator of voter choice than satisfaction with the country
It may seem at first glance like a political riddle: How can President Obama’s job approval rating be above 50% when only about a third of the public is satisfied with the way things are going in the country? In a survey last month by Pew Research Center, 53% approved […] Read more »
We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results.
… Polling results rely as much on the judgments of pollsters as on the science of survey methodology. Two good pollsters, both looking at the same underlying data, could come up with two very different results. How so? Because pollsters make a series of decisions when designing their survey, from […] Read more »
The Bloomberg Politics Poll Decoder
As Election Day nears, we’re being deluged with public opinion polls attempting to measure whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is on track to win the White House. It’s hard to know what to make of the numbers because the polls often tell very different stories. These discrepancies start to […] Read more »
The Impact of Debates? It’s Debatable
With the first of three Hillary Clinton-Donald Trump debates around the corner, the quadrennial question comes begging: Do these showdowns matter? … Can either candidate move the needle? It will be tough: A review of data since 1960 suggests that past debates have almost never directly and measurably changed the […] Read more »
Introducing the New York Times Upshot/Siena College Poll
On Monday, The Upshot and Siena College will release their first survey of likely voters in Florida. It’s a little different from most polls sponsored by major media organizations. Most such surveys contact voters by dialing random telephone numbers. The New York Times Upshot/Siena College poll was conducted using Florida […] Read more »