The 2016 presidential race features two unpopular candidates: both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have unprecedentedly low favorability ratings for major-party candidates. The possibility that a large percentage of voters will not vote for either candidate may lead to a serious third-party challenger, something not seen since Ross Perot’s 1992 […] Read more »
Automatic polling using Computational Linguistics: More reliable than traditional polling?
The outcome of the 2016 EU referendum did not only spell disaster for the incumbent prime minister and the Remain campaign. It also amounted to a PR disaster for the commercial pollsters, with YouGov, Populus, ComRes, ORB Ipsos-Mori and Survation all failing to correctly predict the outcome. … By contrast, […] Read more »
The ‘Referendum Bubble’: What can we learn from EU campaign polling?
With the EU Referendum coming just thirteen months after a General Election in which the predictions were proven so dramatically wrong, pollsters were more cautious about publicising polls over the course of the Referendum campaign. … Predicting Referendum results is even more difficult than predicting General Election results, and estimating […] Read more »
Vice Presidential Selection 2016: Will the Patterns Predict the Picks?
Recurring patterns appear in vice presidential selection that often help predict future choices. Yet change also occurs, sometimes rendering predictions based on past patterns wrong. … Every vice presidential selection is distinctive because the selector, prospective candidates, and the context are never the same. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are […] Read more »
Election Update: Swing State Polls And National Polls Basically Say The Same Thing
… The reason is that our forecast models use both state and national polls to estimate where the national race stands. In fact, they put most of the emphasis on the state numbers. Historically, it’s been more accurate to take a “bottom-up” approach — first, forecast the vote in each […] Read more »
Fundamentally flawed
Over the last dozen years, I have often confessed to being a fundamentalist. This is not a statement of religious conviction, but rather an expression of my belief about what’s most important in presidential elections. While the daily flood of commentary focuses our attention on gaffes and gifs, ads and […] Read more »