Republicans and outside groups used anonymous Twitter accounts to share internal polling data ahead of the midterm elections, CNN has learned, a practice that raises questions about whether they violated campaign finance laws that prohibit coordination. The Twitter accounts were hidden in plain sight. The profiles were publicly available but […] Read more »
The GOP’s numbers problem
… For two years, Republicans had been working to correct one of the party’s greatest embarrassments of recent years: the flawed polling that led so many in the party to believe Mitt Romney was on the cusp of victory in 2012. But after dramatically underestimating Democratic turnout in 2012, it […] Read more »
The Importance of Running Scared
There’s an old saying that there are only two ways for an incumbent to run: scared or unopposed. Many incumbents raise money almost continuously—call it paranoid or just cautious—as if a multimillionaire self-funder were poised to announce a challenge at any moment. This year, an unusually large number of seemingly […] Read more »
How well could we have forecast the midterm election without polls?
One issue that animated some conversation during the 2014 campaign was not just whether the election could be forecasted accurately — it was — but how we should do it. Three of the forecasting models at media organizations — ours at Election Lab, The Upshot’s and 538′s — relied on […] Read more »
Here’s Proof Some Pollsters Are Putting A Thumb On The Scale
It’s time to stop worrying about outliers and start worrying about inliers. Earlier this year, my colleague Harry Enten documented evidence of pollster “herding” — the tendency of polling firms to produce results that closely match one another, especially toward the end of a campaign. What’s wrong with the polls […] Read more »
How much attention should you pay to 2016 polling? Keep an eye on the frontrunner.
We are all sick and tired of 2016 already, of course, but we are going to have to deal with it, for the next two years, with the possible exception of major holidays. Part of this conversation will be the ceaseless trickle trickle trickle of new polls about 2016, which, […] Read more »