Nate Silver, the ESPN journalist behind the FiveThirtyEight website, gave a presentation on the 2016 battleground map to a group of powerful Republican donors in Manhattan last week. Silver was paid to give the presentation by the American Opportunity Alliance, a group led by some of the biggest Republican donors […] Read more »
Obama’s soaring approval numbers are very good news for Hillary Clinton
The last time that President Obama’s approval rating in Washington Post-ABC News polling was as high as it is in our new survey was six months after he took office. At 58 percent, Obama’s approval is 15 points higher than it was on the eve of the 2014 elections, where […] Read more »
Polls Show Trump’s Momentum Has Stalled — For Now
About a dozen national and state polls were released on Sunday and early today. The data was noisy, with some surveys showing that Hillary Clinton had gained ground and others finding that Donald Trump had. But the overall race remains basically unchanged. … Unchanged is good news for Clinton, whose […] Read more »
The Tricky Business of Polling Under Putin
Russia’s designation of its most respected polling agency as a foreign agent last week, hobbling the Yury Levada Centre, shows the extraordinary challenges pollsters face in the country. … Levada is one of three leading Russian polling agencies; the other two are linked to the Kremlin, one owned by the […] Read more »
Popular Presidents Factor Little in Non-Incumbent Elections
The Ronald Reagan presidency offers the most recent historical clues as to whether President Barack Obama’s popularity could affect voters’ choices for president in November. Like Obama, Reagan was earning job approval ratings in the low to mid-50s in the second half of his eighth year. And the Republican nominee […] Read more »
MRP will lead to explosion of 50 state polls
There have been rash of 50-state polls coming out recently: Survey Monkey (with the Washington Post), Ipsos (with Reuters), and Morning Consult all released polls within the week. For the sake of this article think of polling as a two-step process, researchers: collect responses from a sample of the population […] Read more »