There is talk among Republicans, and some trepidation among Democrats, that Donald Trump could benefit from a silent vote. Although these voters aren’t captured by polls, the privacy of a voting booth or a mail-in ballot will allow them to vent their anger and resentments. The theory holds that in […] Read more »
Is A 50-State Poll As Good As 50 State Polls?
It sounds like a riddle of sorts: Is one giant poll of all 50 states the same thing as 50 small polls, one for each state, added together? If this seems like an odd question, it’s because it hadn’t really come up before this year. CONT. Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight See […] Read more »
Trump’s Main November Foe Isn’t Clinton, It’s Demographic Change
To win the White House, Donald Trump may need to turn back the clock and make the American electorate look more like it did in 2004 than in 2012. … So, why are so many polls close right now? One reason: Some pollsters foresee working-class whites making up a larger […] Read more »
Why you should be skeptical of wacky new studies about what sways elections
This has been a rough year for pollsters and pundits, with prediction after prediction going painfully awry. Even those supposedly unflappable data journalists have found themselves stepping in it. But it’s not just the journalists and pollsters. Since I’m a professor of statistics as well as a blogger who often […] Read more »
The Swing States Are Tightening, Too
In the more poll-obsessed corners of the internet, we’ve been arguing about Hillary Clinton’s decline in the polls against Donald Trump. Everyone seems to agree that Clinton’s lead is down quite a bit in national polls, to an average of around 3 percentage points from a peak of about 8 […] Read more »
Hillary Clinton’s Lead Has Shrunk: How to Assess the Polls
The presidential race has become a lot less clear over the last few weeks. Back in mid-August, Hillary Clinton held a large lead over Donald J. Trump. Since then, her lead has slipped — but how far isn’t so obvious. The various forecasting models and polling averages have split about […] Read more »