The venerated Gallup Poll took a beating this year for being such an outlier in its predictions of who would win the presidency, and the New York Times’s Nate Silver has now served up further evidence that the firm has lost its mojo. … What pollster nailed its predictions? A […] Read more »
GOP Grapples With Embarrassing Polling Failures
… Before Election Day, Republicans confidently predicted they would pick up seats in both chambers of Congress, and that Mitt Romney would win the White House. The results shattered those predictions, and with them any sense of security in the numbers coming out of some of the best-regarded polling firms […] Read more »
Predictable in retrospect: The dangers of hindsight bias in election postmortems
The media has undergone a strange change of mindset. Immediately before last Tuesday’s election, many reporters and commentators ignored or dismissed the consensus among forecasters and betting markets that President Obama was very likely to defeat Mitt Romney and acted instead as if the candidates were neck and neck or […] Read more »
Video: Sampling and Weighting
Darrell Bricker, Global CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, explains the science of sampling and weighting, including margin of error. Read more »
The Extraordinary Delusions of the 2012 Election
… There are two striking things to observe about this moment. The first is how good a job professional pollsters did, and the second is how robust the social consensus was on the right that Romney was going to win. … What is important is how well pollsters did in […] Read more »
Who got it right in 2012
Post-election, the discussion of “who got it right” has pretty much begun and ended with Nate Silver. I’m a fan of Silver’s, but some other names deserve to appear on the honor roll. So here’s who I trust more now that the election is over. [cont.] Ezra Klein, Washington Post Read more »