You know all those polls that say Hillary Rodham Clinton has the lead in the race for president in 2016? Ignore them. Polling on presidential preferences this far out is meaningless. [cont.] Jennifer Agiesta, AP Read more »
Craig Charney, the World’s First (and Only) ‘Crisis Pollster’
Craig Charney may be the only person on earth who can claim the job title of “crisis pollster.” In fact, no one had probably thought to put those two words together until 1997, when Charney, with the help of his polling team at Charney Research, began surveying people in the […] Read more »
Big Buzz On Twitter Means Better Chances On Election Day
A new study suggests that candidates whose names were tweeted often — with good or bad comments — showed a stronger result in votes. Robert Siegel speaks with Fabio Rojas, assistant professor in Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington and a coauthor of the study. NPR News Read more »
More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior
Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this question using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided by the Federal Election Commission. … With over 500 million active users in 2012, […] Read more »
How Twitter can help predict an election
… For nearly a century, conventional wisdom has argued that we can only truly know what the public thinks about an issue if we survey a random sample of adults. An entire industry is built on this view. … Digital democracy will put these campaign professionals out of work. New […] Read more »
Nate Silver addresses assembled statisticians at this year’s JSM
Nate Silver of 538 fame gave the President’s invited address this year at the Joint Statistical Meeting in Montreal. Nate began his talk by pointing out that because of his efforts to bring statistical rigor to topics usually covered by journalists he is often portrayed as a kind of statistical […] Read more »