… I am admittedly a bit late to this, but I have a few comments to make on FiveThirtyEight’s recently published retrospective on their forecasts of the 2022 midterm elections. I am writing this as someone who, like Nate Silver, makes a lot of election forecasts, so knows the struggle […] Read more »
Myths about Biden’s electoral strength could spell trouble in 2024
It always amazes me how quickly we forget the anxiety that surrounds close elections. The five anxious days it took for The Associated Press and networks to call the outcome of the 2020 election is burned into the brains of close election-watchers like me. Yet some commentators have developed overly […] Read more »
Primary voters aren’t excited about Biden or Trump. What does that mean for 2024?
The first phase of the 2024 presidential primary season is officially underway, bringing with it a cavalcade of early polling designed to answer a seemingly basic question: whether President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, have the support of their respective parties. That topic, though, is more complicated than […] Read more »
Donald Trump did not win in 2016 because the establishment “split the field”
… Conventional wisdom about the 2016 primary has analysts stipulating that dividing the anti-Trump vote will allow him to win the primary again with plurality support, as he did last time around. After all, he only won 45% of the popular vote in the primary; surely if Ted Cruz, Marco […] Read more »
For Haley, the horse race is just getting started
We are still about a year out from anyone voting in any 2024 presidential primaries, but primary-poll-a-palooza is well underway. … But basing one’s assessment of what could happen on horse-race polls now is folly. Anyone following horse-race polls now is basically like a cat chasing a laser: You think […] Read more »
When is a poll a quality poll? with Natalie Jackson
How can you tell when a poll is actually high quality? Natalie Jackson, research director at PRRI, joins us on this week’s episode of The Downballot to discuss that and more. Jackson tells us the indicators she looks for to determine whether a survey is worth taking seriously, what she […] Read more »