Mark Twain famously said, “There’s lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Lord only knows what he would have said about polls. In modern politics, polls often serve as the canary in the mine — an early warning signal of danger or trends. But polls can also be used to wag the […] Read more »
What We Can Learn From Eric Cantor’s Defeat
… In truth, when an election result hits “10 on the political Richter scale” of shock value, there usually isn’t just one reason for the outcome, but lots of them acting in concert. While surveying the wreckage, Cantor adviser John Murray acknowledged his boss’s loss amounted to “death by a […] Read more »
Overreacting to polls is folly
There’s an unfortunate pattern when it comes to the political world’s erratic fascination with polls. The pattern looks like this: if survey results offer bad news for President Obama, they’re extremely important. If the numbers look good for the White House, they’re meaningless. Not quite two weeks ago, for example, […] Read more »
Push Polls, Defined
“Push polls” — which are not really polls at all — are often criticized as a particularly sleazy form of negative political campaigning. Voters pick up the phone to hear what sounds like a research poll. But there is no effort to collect information, which is what a legitimate poll […] Read more »
Explaining Cantor’s errant poll
I’m going to defend the indefensible and attempt to explain the inexplicable. I’m unwilling to throw up my hands and blame statistics or incompetence for the failure of polls to foresee Rep. Eric Cantor’s primary defeat. Start, in Holmesian fashion, by eliminating the impossible. Those with a middle-school-level knowledge of […] Read more »
The Cantor Prediction Is Part of a Pattern: GOP Pollsters Stink
The last few years have regrettably made the phrase “Republican pollster” less a job title than a punch line. From the 2012 election, where many in the GOP were stunned by the Obama campaign’s victory, to the 2013 closer-than-expected Virginia gubernatorial race, all the way to the present, Republican polling […] Read more »