After my cranky tweets earlier this week criticizing the news media for focusing too much on early campaign polls, I saw this sharp rejoinder: This sort of thing is why people don’t take political scientists seriously. https://t.co/WdKnz2jRbo — David Shor (@davidshor) July 27, 2015 Ouch! To make things worse, David […] Read more »
Four Republicans Are On The Bubble To Get Into The First Debate
At 5 p.m. on Tuesday, a gong will be struck at the Fox News headquarters in New York. At that moment, the five most recent national primary polls, “as recognized by FOX News,” will be averaged, and the top 10 Republican presidential candidates will get invites to the network’s prime-time […] Read more »
The polling primary is underway
… Fox News has limited candidate participation in Thursday’s debate to the top 10 candidates according to an average of the five most recent national polls. Here’s the mystery: Fox News has not said which polls it will use for its average, or what is a legitimate survey. Welcome to […] Read more »
Many Republican Polls Are Measuring a Unicorn Electorate
… The first problem with trying to measure the attitudes of a target population of the national Republican primary electorate is that such an electorate does not actually exist in the quite the same way that other electorates do. The presidential nominating process is a dynamic one, with primaries and […] Read more »
Congratulations to Chris Christie on the first big skewed-polls moment of 2016
Gov. Chris Christie (R) emerged from his typical stoic, demure shell on Tuesday to bash a new poll from New Jersey-based Monmouth University and the pollster that conducted it. … “You guys should know by now that the Monmouth University poll was created just to aggravate me,” Christie said, suggesting […] Read more »
Pollsters to Networks: Please Don’t Use Polls to Decide Who Appears on the Debate Stage
Republican presidential hopefuls are closing in on a tight race: not for their party’s nomination, but for the chance to advocate for their party’s nomination during next week’s first 2016 debate. Whether they’ll get that chance depends entirely on how they’ve performed in recent national polls—a metric that some pollsters […] Read more »