Few things stir the passions of the American public like football. … Curious about just how deep those emotions can run, we asked Americans over two Sunday evenings to give their opinions on topics ranging from the NFL to national politics and their personal financial situations. Afterward, we compared responses between […] Read more »
Moving the AP-GFK Poll Online
The Associated Press-GfK Poll released Wednesday marks the start of a new era for AP polling. From now on, regular polling from the AP and GfK, a global survey research company based in Germany, will be conducted online, interviewing from a unique group of willing survey takers that is representative […] Read more »
The Romney campaign’s own polls showed it would lose
Immediately after the November election, all of the reporting suggested that the Romney camp was in total shock. “Shell-shocked,” said one news report. It quoted a Romney senior adviser saying, “I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming.” Well, that wasn’t true — even within the Romney […] Read more »
No, people don’t understand the budget. But the polls still matter — a lot.
… The fact is that, if we disqualified any poll in which the American people didn’t have a full (or even passing) understanding of the topic, the vast majority of polls would be rendered moot. Whether it’s the budget, the debt limit, or anything else that Congress is doing (including President […] Read more »
PPP’s Results Don’t Excuse Its Bad Methodology
… Polls work for a reason. It’s not voodoo. Polling works because pollsters appreciate and employ sound statistical principles to produce a representative sample of a target population—like, say, American voters. So, no, the “goal” of a poll is not to “get it right,” or another variant of the point […] Read more »
Polling the right people matters
Polling methodology has been a hot topic of late. But in all the discussion about “random deletion,” weighting by vote, analytics and dozens of other important issues, a basic principle has been overlooked, a principle that could well be a key culprit in some recent massive failures — you’ve got […] Read more »