“Ignore the presidential polls,” experts tell us. “Presidential polls are meaningless” this early in the game. OK, so why is everyone paying so much attention to them? Should anyone really care that Donald Trump has “surged” to the top of the crowded Republican field? Or that Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) […] Read more »
Ron Pollard, a Pioneer in Britain’s Betting Industry, Dies at 89
You might not want to wager that the Loch Ness monster, which has made appearances either for real or in imaginations for centuries, was going to show itself indisputably any time soon. But as Ron Pollard understood, a fair number of people would make that bet. Mr. Pollard, a British […] Read more »
The Polls Were Bad in Greece. The Conventional Wisdom Was Worse.
Coming on the heels of the U.K. general election, the Israeli general election, the Scottish referendum and the U.S. midterms, Sunday’s Greek referendum looks like the latest in a series of bad outcomes for pre-election polls across the globe. While the last few polls before the vote showed “Oxi” (“no”) […] Read more »
Is it the end for telephone polling?
Last week I went along to the first public meeting of the investigation into what went wrong with the polling before the general election. It is the British Polling Council’s attempt to find out why all the pollsters spotted that the Scottish National Party was going to do well and […] Read more »
To The Editor: Just say no to horse-race coverage
… Surveys can be useful for gauging what voters care about. But using them to predict elections has become a reckless addiction. Let’s get off them. Consumers of journalism can help. Every time you read, listen to or click on a predictive political story, you enable the angels of our […] Read more »
What’s the Matter With Polling?
… Election polling is in near crisis, and we pollsters know. Two trends are driving the increasing unreliability of election and other polling in the United States: the growth of cellphones and the decline in people willing to answer surveys. … We are less sure how to conduct good survey […] Read more »