Predictions are hard—especially about the future. It must have taken superhuman will for New York Times FiveThirtyEight blogger and columnist Nate Silver to avoid quoting Yogi Berra in the course of writing his engaging and sophisticated new book, The Signal and the Noise, especially because the line is so directly […] Read more »
The Unskewed Election
… There is a vast and longstanding political science literature devoted to explaining the human propensity to fit opinion and even fact to partisan convenience — support for a war, for instance, tends to flip when a new party takes the White Houes — but many of the political scientists […] Read more »
Suspicion of poll, jobs numbers takes hold on right
As the presidential election reaches its apex in intensity, so have arguments from the right that polls and economic statistics — the numbers used to explain the 2012 campaign — are not to be trusted. The theory that many polls are under-sampling Republicans (and thus overstating the support for Obama) […] Read more »
Shifting Party Allegiances Are Tricky for Pollsters
… In the last few weeks, Republican figures such as Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh have questioned polls showing leads for President Barack Obama over Republican nominee Mitt Romney—including, in Mr. Rove’s case, in the opinion section of this newspaper. They say many polls are skewed because far more respondents […] Read more »
Defining Events
… Of the 16 most recent national polls using live telephone interviewers calling both respondents with landlines and those with cell phones (between 30 and 40 percent of voters do not have landlines and cannot legally be called by robo-pollsters), one has the race even, two have Obama with a […] Read more »
Can We Believe the Presidential Polls?
… In the past 30 days, there were 91 national polls (including each Gallup and Rasmussen daily tracking survey). Mr. Obama was at or above the magic number of 50% in just 20. His average was 47.9%. Mr. Romney’s was 45.5%. There were 40 national polls over the same period […] Read more »