People like me are always looking into the polling data to see what has worked well in the past to correctly forecast election results for the future. The problem is that there are a number of polling methods and ideas that worked well in prior years, yet are in opposition […] Read more »
Obama gets boost in swing-state polls
President Obama got welcome final-week polling news Wednesday as new surveys in several keenly contested states showed him holding or expanding a lead. … The raft of new numbers bolstered the campaign narrative from the president and his aides, who claim the electoral college math doesn’t add up for Romney […] Read more »
Pundits versus probabilities
… The most well-known quantitative analyst of politics is Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight blog now appears on the New York Times website. … Unfortunately, Silver has become the target of a vitriolic backlash from innumerate pundits whose market dominance is under threat as well as ill-informed conservative commentators who think […] Read more »
What State Polls Suggest About the National Popular Vote
Mitt Romney and President Obama remain roughly tied in national polls, while state polls are suggestive of a lead for Mr. Obama in the Electoral College. Most people take this to mean that there is a fairly good chance of a split outcome between the Electoral College and the popular […] Read more »
With popularity rising, polls bringing more questions than answers
Who is up and who is down in the presidential race today? There is a poll for you to consult; six, actually. What does the horse race look like in Ohio? There’s another poll to chew on. Or seven in the past week. Polling mania has infused media coverage of […] Read more »
The Polling Bias Debate
When the term “unskewed polls” entered the political lexicon this fall, courtesy of a conservative blogger convinced that national pollsters were missing a looming Romney landslide, there was a lot of talk about how the right’s polling skepticism was ushering in a landscape in which every observer would become a […] Read more »