Although the 2016 election is nearly 500 days away, the nation — or at least the nation’s political junkies — remain hungry for news about the presidential campaign. … So what’s a political junkie to do? Watch this number: President Obama’s approval rating. As political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher […] Read more »
The Polls Were Bad in Greece. The Conventional Wisdom Was Worse.
Coming on the heels of the U.K. general election, the Israeli general election, the Scottish referendum and the U.S. midterms, Sunday’s Greek referendum looks like the latest in a series of bad outcomes for pre-election polls across the globe. While the last few polls before the vote showed “Oxi” (“no”) […] Read more »
The Republican Debate Selection Process Is a New Wild Card in Presidential Politics
… An analysis by the Bloomberg Politics polling team of the entry criteria released by Fox News suggests that it will be virtually impossible to know which candidates will qualify for the first debate until just days before the event, regardless of what they do in the coming weeks. And […] Read more »
Group pilots new polling venture in Maryland
… Figuring out how people actually feel when they respond to political polls — and separating those feelings from the hyper-partisanship that has come to define the nation’s politics — is at the heart of a new effort by a University of Maryland researcher and a longtime political operative. The […] Read more »
What Trump’s Poll Numbers Mean
Everyone is buzzing about polls showing Donald Trump in second place among Republican presidential candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire as well as nationally. What can this mean? We know that the relationship between such early polls and the eventual nomination results is weak. Doing well in June surveys, more […] Read more »
Mistaken memories
Last week ended with a momentous Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, while this week closes with the patriotism of the Fourth of July. I’m actually going to try to connect those disparate events in a way that’s relevant to survey research methodology. From another perspective, this piece is all […] Read more »