Reports say GOP front-runner Donald Trump has 25 to 30 percent of voter support in recent polls. But, not so fast, says Nate Silver of the data news site Five Thirty Eight. It’s early yet, and when you break those numbers down it’s more like six to eight percent of […] Read more »
Don’t Buy Trump’s Big Lead
The latest CNN/ORC poll has captured a tremendous amount of attention because real estate mogul Donald Trump has hit a polling high of 36 percent. … When you examine the poll, which was taken from Nov. 27 through Dec. 1, 2015 (which was a holiday weekend and is problematical all […] Read more »
60 Days Until Iowa: Are the Polls Predicting the Winners?
… Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump now hold comfortable leads in almost all the national polls and most state surveys, though Bernie Sanders is neck and neck with Clinton in the Granite State. What does history say about the predictive power of both the national polls and the state polls […] Read more »
Why horse race campaign polls are mostly worthless this far ahead of the voting
… Horse race polls have become the junk food of political journalism. We consume too many of them, too often. I’m as guilty as anyone else — and maybe more; I don’t just read about the polls, I write about them. (That makes me a pusher.) But here’s an inconvenient […] Read more »
The Future Of Polling May Depend On Donald Trump’s Fate
Does Donald Trump lead the race for the Republican presidential nomination? Or does he lead it by a “yuuuuuge” margin? Bloomberg recently released a poll that gave Trump 24 percent to Ben Carson’s 20 percent. On the same day, Ipsos released a poll that put Trump at 37 percent to […] Read more »
Does Polling Undermine Democracy?
“Polls are wielding greater influence over American elections than ever,” as the reliability of those measurements has become more questionable, Jill Lepore wrote recently in a wide-ranging examination of public opinion surveys in The New Yorker. Have polls been given too great a role in American politics? Are these surveys […] Read more »