Here are two more takes at it. First, courtesy of UNC Ph.D. student Brice Acree, takes my original plot and then adds an underlying measure of uncertainty—essentially, the margin of error for the estimated margin of victory. Second, spurred on by a friend who is also a pollster, I calculated […] Read more »
The Rise of the Quants in Political Prognostication
As President Barack Obama celebrated re-election, number-crunching geeks everywhere could revel in redemption. For months, political pundits and reporters said that the race between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney was too close to call. Not so, insisted a new breed of political analysts who rejected intuition and relied instead on […] Read more »
A Vast Left-Wing Competency
… Those who went into the polling business on the left were political consultants, too, but many of them also possessed serious scholarly credentials and had derailed promising academic careers to go into politics. Now that generation—Stan Greenberg, Celinda Lake, Mark Mellman, Diane Feldman, among others—preside over firms that see […] Read more »
Election Result Proves a Victory for Pollsters and Other Data Devotees
It was not on any ballot, but one of the biggest election contests this week pitted pundits against pollsters. It was a pitched battle between two self-assured rivals: those who relied on an unscientific mixture of experience, anecdotal details and “Spidey sense,” and those who stuck to cold, hard numbers. […] Read more »
How Did Pollsters Fare on Election Night?
Despite the challenges facing pollsters, including declines in landline telephone penetration and in response rates, polling firms generally did a good job of calling the presidential election. National polls just ahead of the election showed President Barack Obama holding a slim lead, and he was ahead by 2.2 percentage points […] Read more »
Gallup(ing) Away from the Herd
… Now that the exit polls are public, we can assess Gallup’s expectations about a Republican partisan advantage, the lynchpin of Gallup’s lonely prediction that Romney would win the popular vote. … We know that Gallup did not force their likely voter sample to fit a pre-determined distribution of partisan […] Read more »