Election polls especially suffer from two specific types of measurement error: (1) election salience among voters at the time of the poll and (2) strategic voting decisions at the time of the vote which are at odds with poll responses. On point one, the research literature shows that the farther […] Read more »
Campaign polls are still variable. Votes are still predictable.
The heat of a presidential campaign is always a delicate time for the relationship between political scientists and political journalists. While there’s been more dialogue and understanding between these two types of analysts in recent years (much of it prompted by the ease of communication between the two worlds on […] Read more »
Flaws in Polling Data Exposed as U.S. Campaign Season Heats Up
… Are the polls correct? While that is hardly a new question, doubts are intensifying after a series of high-profile misfires around the world in the past year, notably in Greece, Israel and the UK. As politics and business lean increasingly on surveys and data, technological and social shifts are […] Read more »
Iowa polls have a big problem
… Most polls that purport to provide Iowa caucus results simply ask each interviewee whether they are likely to attend a caucus. The tendency to say yes yields responses so highly inflated as to be worthless. … Unlike public pollsters, campaigns pay substantial sums to purchase lists of previous attendees […] Read more »
The problem with polls
… Once a seemingly infallible cornerstone of the political system, public opinion polls have racked up a few big-time fails in recent years, embarrassments that compelled a leading firm to conduct an internal audit to find out what went wrong. Analysts are also openly questioning whether the industry, whose leaders […] Read more »
Understanding abortion polling
Polls that attempt to assess public opinion on abortion have yielded similar results for decades: the public is split nearly 50/50 on the question of whether abortion should be legal in all or most cases, or illegal with exceptions or banned outright. But according to pollster Tresa Undem, these numbers […] Read more »