In the race for Congress, most polls report one national percentage for Democrats and Republicans. But that’s not very helpful – because this is a race for seats. 435 of them, in fact. So the CBS News/YouGov Battleground Tracker will report seats: how many districts the Democrats would get, and […] Read more »
‘The sky is not falling’: Two major studies show election polls are not getting less accurate
Donald Trump’s 2016 election and other surprising election results around the world in recent years set off alarms about a crisis in election polling. But two massive studies come to the opposite conclusion: Polls in recent elections are just about as accurate as they have been historically, if not a […] Read more »
FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast: A Conversation About Our Pollster Ratings
FiveThirtyEight has updated its pollster ratings for the first time since before the 2016 presidential election. In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver discusses the state of polling in the U.S. and what to expect in 2018. FiveThirtyEight Read more »
A Post-Memorial Day Status Report
In a bygone political era, the symbolic end of summer — Labor Day — denoted the unofficial start of the campaign season. In our current era, one might be tempted to say that the symbolic start of summer — Memorial Day — now represents the campaign season kickoff, though American […] Read more »
Which Pollsters To Trust In 2018
As FiveThirtyEight has evolved over the past 10 years, we’ve taken an increasingly “macro” view of polling. By that, I mean: We’re more interested in how the polls are doing overall — and in broad trends within the polling industry — and less in how individual polls or pollsters are […] Read more »
Why You Should Focus on Independents
I don’t trust anyone who tells me they already know the makeup of the midterm electorate. We can’t possibly know who will vote in the fall, let alone how they will cast their ballots. If I were going to focus on a handful of variables to understand how the cycle […] Read more »