CBS’s coverage of the Democratic primary is highly misleading in its estimates of the number of convention delegates that each candidate might win “through Super Tuesday.” Why? CBS’s Battleground Tracker implicitly assumes all voters will cast their ballots at roughly the same time. That is not the case, and it […] Read more »
Beware confirmation bias with the 2020 presidential race
“The next debate is do or die for many Democratic hopefuls.” Andrew Yang “is on fire.” Elizabeth Warren is “surging.” “It’s a three-way race.” I’m betting you can think of a long list of other things you’ve heard on television or read in print to explain what is going on […] Read more »
Don’t Use General Election Polls To Try To Predict The Primaries
We know we’ve told you that early general election polls are pretty meaningless in predicting who will win the presidency at this point in the election cycle, more than a year in advance, but we were curious: Could they tell us anything about how a candidate might perform in the […] Read more »
Why the GOP victory in North Carolina spells disaster for Democrats in 2020
Republicans’ special election victory Tuesday in North Carolina’s 9th District is the latest evidence that 2020 will be a very different election from 2018. Rep.-elect Dan Bishop didn’t just overcome his Democrat opponent’s two-year head start and millions of dollars in out-of-state money. He also outperformed the GOP candidate’s 2018 […] Read more »
High Stakes in Virginia General Assembly Election will Preview 2020 Presidential
In the wake of the Blue Tsunami that crashed through Virginia on election night in November 2017, the state’s Democrats found their political fortunes in the House of Delegates dramatically transformed. … With two post-Trump elections behind them, both of which had produced large turnout surges for Democrats and sympathetic […] Read more »
Is It Really A Three-Candidate Race?
A much-discussed poll last month showing an effective three-way tie between Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders at the top of the Democratic primary field has since proven to be something of an outlier. But the narrative that the Democratic primary has collapsed down into a three-way race between […] Read more »