… News organizations generally conduct their polls on issues that are in the headlines, and it’s usually a safe assumption that Americans are familiar with the basic issues and should be able to offer an opinion. … What pollsters have learned is that people generally have formed opinions on a […] Read more »
Parties Are More Consequential than Clever Framing: Estate Tax Edition
… Framing effects, while real, are not as powerful and omnipresent as people sometimes imagine. In experiments, framing in news reports and survey questions can change opinions. But while framing can change mass opinion on an issue, it often doesn’t in practice. The reason is that framing effects are much […] Read more »
Mobile Technologies for Conducting, Augmenting and Potentially Replacing Surveys
Public opinion research is entering a new era, one in which traditional survey research may play a less dominant role. … The rapid adoption of smartphones and ubiquity of social media are interconnected trends which may provide researchers with new data collection tools and alternative sources of information to augment […] Read more »
Why two Louisiana Senate polls show wildly differing results
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) is in the reelection race of her life, but two early polls in the past month disagree sharply on how much danger she’s in. A closer look reveals why. The latest was a siren: Landrieu’s negative ratings rocketed 30 percentage points since 2012, and her reelection […] Read more »
No, undecided voters don’t break for the challenger
For as long as we can remember, some political folks have subscribed to a theory, and it is this: Undecideds break for the challenger. … Wrong. According to a Fix study of 25 competitive U.S. Senate races held over the last four elections, undecideds actually appear to break more for […] Read more »
Why you shouldn’t trust internal polls
… Over the past two and a half weeks, both Mike Rounds and Rick Weiland have released polls conducted on behalf of their campaign. … Neither poll released the full question order, nor the cross-tabs. The former especially is vital to judging the accuracy of a poll, because it’s well-established […] Read more »