… The first problem with trying to measure the attitudes of a target population of the national Republican primary electorate is that such an electorate does not actually exist in the quite the same way that other electorates do. The presidential nominating process is a dynamic one, with primaries and […] Read more »
2016 Endorsements: How and Why They Matter
William “Boss” Tweed captured the importance of the nominating process when he said that he didn’t care who did the electing, as long as he got to do the nominating. … Party elites have figured out that they can nudge voters one way or another by coming to a consensus […] Read more »
Early polls don’t mean much. It’s still possible to report on them.
… We know from presidential general elections that polling this early is not correlated with outcomes in November. We know from presidential primary elections that poll surges are often ephemeral, in part because they reflect how the media covers primary candidates. For both reasons, we should discount where the candidates […] Read more »
Two Approaches to Predicting Which Party Will Win in 2016
The 2016 presidential election is still more than a year away. It is highly likely that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, but it is difficult to tell who the Republican nominee will be, with 18 currently declared candidates and Republican elites slow to generate a front-runner through endorsements. […] Read more »
A Small Senate Battlefield
Since we last took a comprehensive look at the 2016 Senate races, a slew of new candidates have jumped in, some promising contenders have dropped out, and intraparty competition has intensified. Sounds dramatic. Yet what most strikes us is the overall stability, thus far at least, of the Senate picture. […] Read more »
How did the pollsters get the British elections so very wrong?
The past 12 months have not been kind to political pollsters. Opinion polls have been well wide of the mark in the U.S. midterms, the Israeli general election, the Greek and Scottish referendums, and the British general election. The U.K. election was perhaps the most embarrassing of all. … In […] Read more »