Among the many moving parts of elections, the behavior of undecided voters can be among the toughest to suss out. Some don’t make up their minds until the last few days of a campaign, even on the last day. Some never do and either don’t vote at all or skip […] Read more »
Political Polling Is Still Terrible … and Might Get Worse
Is the polling industry in crisis? And, perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for our democracy if we can’t trust information telling us what our fellow citizens think? Bloomberg The OPINION TODAY email newsletter is a concise daily rundown of significant new poll results and insightful analysis. It’s FREE. Sign up here: opiniontoday.substack Read more »
Polling isn’t broken. But we too often miss its hidden signals.
… Human brains and eyes naturally gravitate to margins — because margins quickly summarize the data. But like all summaries, they can obscure, or ignore, important information. There’s a difference between a contest where a candidate leads 53 percent to 45 percent, with 2 percent undecided, and one where the […] Read more »
It’s important to ask why 2020 polls were off. It’s more important to ask what will happen next.
… Polling isn’t built to be an instrument that correctly identifies the winner in a race that comes down to one or two percentage points. It’s meant to roughly evaluate the views of a population with predictable margins of error. Those margins are reduced when polls are averaged, but we […] Read more »
The Big Question: How Do You Make Polls More Accurate?
Frank Wilkinson: You’ve conducted the famed Iowa Poll, published by the Des Moines Register and rated A+ by FiveThirtyEight, since the 1990s. It’s an Iowa institution. … I actually received an email this week from someone whom I respect a great deal that included the phrase, “polling is broken.” Is […] Read more »
Mason-Dixon pollster Brad Coker on ‘shy Trump voters,’ polls and the 2020 election
The 2020 presidential election is (mostly) in the books and the political world is once again fiercely debating a familiar question from 2016: What went wrong with public-opinion polls in a number of key battleground states? One poll that came out looking pretty good was the Star Tribune/MPR News/KARE 11 […] Read more »