With the 2018 midterm elections approaching, we’ve updated FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings for the first time since the 2016 presidential primaries. Based on how the media portrayed the polls after President Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton later that year, you might expect pollsters to get a pretty disastrous report card. But […] Read more »
How surprising was Trump’s victory? Evaluations of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and a new poll aggregation model
The U.S. presidential election results of 2016 surprised many poll-watchers, suggesting possible biases in estimated support for the major party candidates and posing a challenge for poll aggregation as a prediction tool. Using data from earlier elections and the 2016 campaign, we evaluated poll aggregation performance for the major prediction […] Read more »
Recent special elections suggest Democrats may not ride a wave in November
Democrats have taken a tumble on the generic congressional ballot over the last few months. Their advantage in an average of the last five live interview polls is just under 7 percentage points, and it’s even lower when you consider other polls. The Democrats, though, have been taking solace in […] Read more »
Introducing our prediction model for America’s mid-term elections
ON NOVEMBER 6th 2018 the United States will hold elections for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Congress. These are contested every two years, both alongside the presidential race and in mid-term elections. … The Economist has developed a statistical model for the House, […] Read more »
Has the Blue Wave Already Crested?
Marginal improvement in President Trump’s job approval ratings and a shrinking Democratic advantage on the national generic ballot has spooked a lot of Democrats and cheered up a lot of Republicans. What once looked like a huge tsunami that threatened to demolish the GOP in the House (and maybe in […] Read more »
Clues From the Upcoming California Primary
House analysts know that handicapping results in individual seats can be tricky for a lot of reasons, including the lack of independent polling in most districts. Yes, the party committees, campaigns, and other outside groups will survey the districts, but many of these polls will never see the light of […] Read more »