Today, we grieve the loss of our founder, mentor and bedrock, Andrew Kohut, who led Pew Research Center from 2004 until 2012 and previously led Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. He passed away this morning. CONT. Michael Dimock, Pew Read more »
Memo to MSM Bloviators: Get a Clue About Polling
… Given their desperate 24-hour scramble for fresh “content,” we don’t expect the mainstream media or the online alternate outlets to adopt serious standards about polls or intellectual honesty in reporting them. But as loyal readers know, you can rely on Calbuzz to shed some light from time to time. […] Read more »
Polling’s ‘spectacular disasters’
Former Hewlett-Packard boss Carly Fiorina is expected to make the main GOP debate on September 16, after CNN tweaked its selection criteria. It blamed a lack of recent high-quality polls of the 17 Republicans running for president. That speaks to the disruption in the business of polling, where track records […] Read more »
How Iowa’s premier pollster sees the 2016 race shaking out
The release of new Iowa poll numbers by the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg Politics is one of the few stop-what-you-are-doing-and-see-what-they-say moments left in politics. The woman behind the poll, which gets Iowa right every time, is Ann Selzer. After the new Register numbers came out Saturday night, I reached […] Read more »
Here’s why you should worry about the polls for the 2016 U.S. elections — and beyond
We rely on opinion polls, not just to get a line on the horse race that is the presidential election campaign, but also to learn what Americans (and people in other countries) think about important issues. As George Gallup said many decades ago, polling is central to modern democracy. But […] Read more »
The GOP’s emerging Carly Fiorina problem
Carly Fiorina’s campaign is mad, and with good reason. … CNN, like Fox News before it, will only feature 10 candidates during its prime-time debate. In theory, that’s good news for Fiorina. But in practice, it isn’t. … “Despite being solidly in the top 10 by every measure, the political […] Read more »