Lately, pundits and punters seem bullish on Donald Trump, whose chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination recently inched above 20 percent for the first time at the betting market Betfair. … If past nomination races are any guide, the vast majority of eventual Republican voters haven’t made up their […] Read more »
State of election markets: 352 Days
I cut the Republican chart down to five candidates this week; four of them have a non-negligible chance of winning the nomination and, because many consider him the front-runner, Ben Carson. On the Democratic side of the election, Hillary Clinton went from dominate to nearly unbeatable as polls showed her […] Read more »
Two very different views of the 2016 GOP primary
During elections, polling companies create a multitude of snapshots of how potential voters would vote if the election were held that day. But, the U.S. does not call snap elections; the first votes will not be cast for 75 days. And those people who answer polls are not necessarily the […] Read more »
The Benefits of Random Probability Sampling: The 2015 British Election Study Face-to-Face
This post reveals the BES 2015 vote intention figures for the face-to-face survey and discusses them in the context of representativeness achieved via random probability sampling and efforts to interview hard-to-reach respondents. … Unlike almost every other pre- and post-election survey (including our own internet panel), the reported vote in […] Read more »
New research suggests why UK general election polls were so inaccurate
New research into May’s general election sheds light on what went wrong with the opinion polls, which notoriously all failed to predict David Cameron’s outright win. … The new study has significant implications for the ongoing British Polling Council postmortem into what went wrong, which is chaired by Prof Patrick […] Read more »
A Year Out, Ignore General Election Polls
“The Doctor Is In As Carson Ties Trump In GOP Race, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Carson Tops Clinton By 10 Points In General Election” That was the headline on a press release for the Quinnipiac University poll last week. My reaction? I hoped no one spent more than two […] Read more »