One big question looms over the fight for control of Congress: Will strong Democratic candidates ride a blue wave to victories on Nov. 6 in the long list of Republican-leaning areas they’ve put into play? Or will partisan polarization carry Republicans to a closer than expected midterm result? The fight […] Read more »
An Upset That Nobody Sees Coming Could Determine Control Of The House
… Individual House races are fairly hard to predict. They don’t get all that much polling. Sometimes the candidates make a big difference, and sometimes they don’t. There will be lots of idiosyncratic and even “surprising” demographic patterns that emerge on Nov. 6, but the whole reason they’ll be surprises […] Read more »
Beware of Preelection Polling Spin
At this late phase of the electoral season, there is a blur of polling data from different directions and of variable quality. You can pretty much cherry-pick data to support almost any prophecy you want. CONT. Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine Read more »
A Tale of Two Increasingly Divergent Elections
It turns out that the bitter fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination was what I call a color-enhancement event—it made the reds redder and the blues bluer. The old cliché about partisans coming home before an election is true, but the reality for Democrats was that this time, they […] Read more »
How the polls could have caught ‘surprise’ victories like Trump’s
Many pollsters have been asked to explain why they didn’t better predict the 2016 election. 3dfoto/shutterstock.com Fred Wright, North Carolina State University The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency surprised almost everyone, including apparently Trump himself. On the morning after the 2016 election, my teenage son made snarky […] Read more »
Nate Silver will make one firm prediction about the midterms. Most journalists won’t want to hear it.
After the roller-coaster ride of 2016’s election night, have journalists and political junkies learned not to let conventional wisdom substitute for hard knowledge? Nate Silver — the closest thing there is to a celebrity in the arcane field of statistical journalism — is not wildly optimistic about that. CONT. Margaret […] Read more »