If you are following some of the same people that I do on Twitter, you may have noticed some pushback about our contention that Barack Obama is a favorite (and certainly not a lock) to be re-elected. I haven’t come across too many analyses suggesting that Mitt Romney is the […] Read more »
‘New York Times’ Bully Knocks Stack Of Polls From Nate Silver’s Hands
As part of his continued effort to torment the 34-year-old statistician and blogger, feared New York Times bully Derek Kriesel reportedly slapped a stack of opinion polls from Nate Silver’s hands Friday, scattering the surveys across the floor of the organization’s newsroom. [cont.] The Onion Read more »
Coming Down to the End of the Line in 2012
… With the lack of a strong partisan wave favoring one party or the other, it’s unclear how undecided voters will break. This uncertainty is compounded by the fact that too many polls from normally reliable pollsters are contradictory. Sure, averaging all polls (as some do) is one way to […] Read more »
Why Polling Is Always Political
Serious marketers, innovators and quants can’t find a better — or more controversial — case study in the problems and pathologies of predictive analytics than America’s down-to-the-wire presidential campaign. There’s not a business in the world today that shouldn’t be reexamining their own data-driven marketing research and customers analytic practices […] Read more »
Polls giving partisans lots of room to argue
… Regardless of what any given poll says, it’s likely that someone – a campaign, an interest group, a political party or a rival polling operation – will argue that the survey is invalid at the same time someone else argues that it’s significant. Polls have become political tools and […] Read more »
The Dark Art of Political Polling
How could a Gallup Organization survey published a week before the election show Mitt Romney up by 5 percentage points, while a CBS/New York Times poll from the same period put him 1 point behind President Obama? Even professional poll watchers don’t know. [cont.] Peter Coy, Bloomberg Businessweek Read more »