Since Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, several national polls have shown him narrowing the gap with his likely opponent, Hillary Clinton, or even leading. But the election is more than five months away. When should you start to care about polls? With some caveats, we believe the answer […] Read more »
How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump
… Trump is one of the most astonishing stories in American political history. If you really expected the Republican front-runner to be bragging about the size of his anatomy in a debate, or to be spending his first week as the presumptive nominee feuding with the Republican speaker of the […] Read more »
Election forecasting in the age of Trump
… For decades, political scientists and economists have concocted statistical models to try to predict presidential elections even before the actual campaigns were under way. Their aim wasn’t merely to pull off the parlor trick of predicting a winner; more important (to them, at least) was figuring out what makes […] Read more »
Defense of Polling, but Not-Defense of Models for Primaries
Someone forwarded me this article by Ray Hennessy: The Problem With Polling, Surveys and Opinion Is That People Fib. The piece so (1) riddled with factual errors (2) over-the-top “business lessons” I thought it was a joke. My friend convinced me that the author was serious, so I am going […] Read more »
The political scientist who saw Trump’s rise coming
In the summer of 2015, most of the political world still thought Donald Trump’s candidacy was a joke. Norm Ornstein didn’t. … And in an August 2015 piece for the Atlantic titled “Maybe this time really is different,” he made that case. … So here’s his explanation for how he […] Read more »
The Four Things I Learned From The Donald Trump Primary
There are a lot of mea culpas floating around from people who thought it would snow in July — in Miami — before Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president. … I wrote a pre-emptive mea culpa back in December, when it was already clear that my initial skepticism […] Read more »