Can we trust the polls? That’s a real question these days. Pollsters have been trying — and not always successfully — to adapt their methodologies to keep up with cultural and technological change. … Some in the prediction business have wondered if we’re moving toward a “post-polling world.” Would prediction […] Read more »
Polls Show Pennsylvania Back In Clinton’s Firewall
At FiveThirtyEight, we generally prefer state polls to national polls. So far, though, we haven’t had much of them to work with. If you’re getting dozens of national polls every week, but just a smattering of state-level surveys — and that’s what we’ve been getting — you’re better off inferring […] Read more »
The Polls Aren’t Skewed: Trump Really Is Losing Badly
We’ve reached that stage of the campaign. The back-to-school commercials are on the air, and the “unskewing” of polls has begun — the quadrennial exercise in which partisans simply adjust the polls to get results more to their liking, usually with a thin sheen of math-y words to make it […] Read more »
A Favorable Poll for Donald Trump Has a Potential Problem
There’s an interesting new entry in political polling: the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times “Daybreak” poll. It’s different from other surveys because it’s a panel, which means it recontacts the same voters over and over. … But so far, the U.S.C./LAT panel has consistently been far out of step with other […] Read more »
Unskewing the unskewers: A look at the new theories for why Trump is actually winning
Here on Planet Earth, the best understanding of the state of the presidential race is that Hillary Clinton has a solid-but-not-insurmountable lead. Recent polls — statistically measured surveys of thousands of American voters — have shown Clinton up by anywhere from 1 to 15 points over the course of the […] Read more »
How did Marist, Monmouth, Suffolk and Quinnipiac get known for political polling?
Americans addicted to political polls can get their fix these days from a growing number of colleges and universities that measure the ups and downs of presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in a tumultuous election year. … For these schools, polling in a polarized America yields a marketing […] Read more »