The 2016 presidential race features two unpopular candidates: both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have unprecedentedly low favorability ratings for major-party candidates. The possibility that a large percentage of voters will not vote for either candidate may lead to a serious third-party challenger, something not seen since Ross Perot’s 1992 […] Read more »
Don’t be fooled by convention bounces
It’s only early July, but it’s time to prepare for a barrage of chatter about possible Republican and Democratic convention bounces. That’s because this cycle both party conventions will take place entirely in July. … Over the next few weeks, you’ll see lots of articles about what kinds of polling […] Read more »
Automatic polling using Computational Linguistics: More reliable than traditional polling?
The outcome of the 2016 EU referendum did not only spell disaster for the incumbent prime minister and the Remain campaign. It also amounted to a PR disaster for the commercial pollsters, with YouGov, Populus, ComRes, ORB Ipsos-Mori and Survation all failing to correctly predict the outcome. … By contrast, […] Read more »
The ‘Referendum Bubble’: What can we learn from EU campaign polling?
With the EU Referendum coming just thirteen months after a General Election in which the predictions were proven so dramatically wrong, pollsters were more cautious about publicising polls over the course of the Referendum campaign. … Predicting Referendum results is even more difficult than predicting General Election results, and estimating […] Read more »
Why Hillary Clinton being slightly less hated than Donald Trump could make all the difference
… If we look at the net favorability ratings for candidates past and present, it becomes immediately obvious how this year’s crop of candidates are outliers. If we subtract the percentage of people who view the candidates strongly unfavorably from those who view them strongly favorably, we get a net […] Read more »
How do people really feel about the economy?
… This post will not tackle the substance of Americans’ worries about the economy but instead highlights a puzzle arising from pollsters’ efforts to quantify those worries. I’ll show that, when Americans are asked specifically about the economy, in an apolitical context, they are for the most part not nearly […] Read more »