Mark Sanford is heading off to Washington DC, while pollsters are heading back to their workshops. His victory by 9pt over Elizabeth Colbert Busch in South Carolina’s first district special election was surprisingly large. The last two public polls from Public Policy Polling (PPP) and Red Racing Horses (RRH) had […] Read more »
Reliability needed for GOP image
Many Republicans vehemently champion accountability when it comes to measuring the performance of our governments at the national, state and local levels, but seem less enthusiastic about keeping score when it comes to our party’s own standing in the polls. That should change. Republicans need to choose some metrics that […] Read more »
Does Gomez Have a Real Chance in Massachusetts?
A common cognitive bias in political analysis is what Daniel Kahneman calls the availability heuristic: the tendency to focus on recent or familiar examples as opposed to the broader course of history and the richer volume of precedents. There is some risk of this in Massachusetts, where the Democrat Martha […] Read more »
In Massachusetts, Kids Poll the Darndest Things
The first post-primary poll in next month’s Massachusetts Senate special election was released Thursday, but while the survey carried the name of a prominent Boston university, it wasn’t conducted by the school or its faculty. The automated poll was conducted by a newly-reinstated student group on campus. That didn’t stop […] Read more »
Six Ways to Separate Lies From Statistics
The discovery of a spreadsheet error in an influential study by Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff inevitably raises a troubling question: To what extent can we trust what any researcher claims to be true? The unfortunate reality is that mistakes much more serious than the one committed […] Read more »
The Iraq Sanctions Myth
… The claim that sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children originated in a 1995 letter to The Lancet which, in turn, was based on a Baghdad survey done by Sarah Zaidi and colleagues. After other researchers identified anomalies in the survey data, Zaidi, to her great credit, re-investigated […] Read more »