New research into May’s general election sheds light on what went wrong with the opinion polls, which notoriously all failed to predict David Cameron’s outright win. … The new study has significant implications for the ongoing British Polling Council postmortem into what went wrong, which is chaired by Prof Patrick […] Read more »
Polling: Good, evil or somewhere in between?
The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore has a deep dive into the world of polling in the latest edition of the magazine. The piece asks a very pointed question: Is polling a good thing for us as a society? … As an avid consumer and student of political polling, I wondered […] Read more »
Politics and the New Machine
… The Path to Office is long. To reach the Land of Caucuses and Primaries, the Candidate must first cross the Sea of Polls. … Lately, the Sea of Polls is deeper than ever before, and darker. From the late nineteen-nineties to 2012, twelve hundred polling organizations conducted nearly thirty-seven […] Read more »
Overseas Elections Offer Warnings for U.S. Pollsters
Pre-election polls in numerous countries this year have widely missed their marks, often by underestimating support for candidates on the ideological fringes. … “The industry has a collective failure problem,” said John Curtice, the president of the British Polling Council and a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde in […] Read more »
A Year Out, Ignore General Election Polls
“The Doctor Is In As Carson Ties Trump In GOP Race, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Carson Tops Clinton By 10 Points In General Election” That was the headline on a press release for the Quinnipiac University poll last week. My reaction? I hoped no one spent more than two […] Read more »
Why Polling, Data & Analytics Will Finally Converge in 2016
… On our campaign, and the other smart Republican campaigns in 2016, the polling and data operations were, and will be very tightly integrated. As predictive modelers, it’s our job to study the electorate and provide probabilities of turnout likelihood, along with establishing the base of who we believe will […] Read more »