… Trump has had a reasonably strong couple of days in the polls, and the odds according to our forecast have resumed moving slowly but steadily toward him after having flattened out toward the end of last week. As is often the case, however, it’s hard to attribute causality. … […] Read more »
Polls Show Trump’s Momentum Has Stalled — For Now
About a dozen national and state polls were released on Sunday and early today. The data was noisy, with some surveys showing that Hillary Clinton had gained ground and others finding that Donald Trump had. But the overall race remains basically unchanged. … Unchanged is good news for Clinton, whose […] Read more »
Real-Time Election Day Projections May Upend News Tradition
For decades, news organizations have refrained from releasing early results in presidential battleground states on Election Day, adhering to a strict, time-honored embargo until a majority of polls there have closed. Now, a group of data scientists, journalists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is seeking to upend that reporting tradition, providing […] Read more »
Why you should be skeptical of wacky new studies about what sways elections
This has been a rough year for pollsters and pundits, with prediction after prediction going painfully awry. Even those supposedly unflappable data journalists have found themselves stepping in it. But it’s not just the journalists and pollsters. Since I’m a professor of statistics as well as a blogger who often […] Read more »
How Obama will lift Clinton to victory, barely
At the American Political Science Association (APSA) meetings last week in Philadelphia, Charles Tien and I released our presidential election forecast, as did other political science forecasters. We called a narrow win for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, with 51 percent of the popular vote share (the Democratic and Republican total). […] Read more »
The Swing States Are Tightening, Too
In the more poll-obsessed corners of the internet, we’ve been arguing about Hillary Clinton’s decline in the polls against Donald Trump. Everyone seems to agree that Clinton’s lead is down quite a bit in national polls, to an average of around 3 percentage points from a peak of about 8 […] Read more »