There seemed to be one safe bet when it came to the 2020 election results: Democrats would easily hold on to their majority in the House of Representatives. Not only that, but the conventional wisdom held that Democrats would pick up more than the 235 seats they won in the […] Read more »
Understanding how 2020 election polls performed and what it might mean for other kinds of survey work
Taken in the aggregate, preelection polls in the United States pointed to the strong likelihood that Democrat Joe Biden would pick up several states that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 and, in the process, win a popular and electoral vote majority over Republican President Donald Trump. That indeed came to […] Read more »
Next Stop: Georgia
On this week’s episode of Poll Hub, the composition of the U.S. government literally hangs in the balance with two U.S. Senate race runoffs in Georgia serving as arbiters. As time elapses from Election Day to January, what are the challenges for both parties? Then, Pfizer’s announcement of a potentially […] Read more »
2020 Post Election Poll Analysis of an Election Like No Other
As we have done, every two years in federal elections, since 1994, we once again conducted a post-election poll of 1,000 actual voters online who either voted early or on election day. The survey had an accuracy of +/- 3.1% at a 95% confidence interval. The voters were interviewed on […] Read more »
Why did the polls undercount Trump voters?
… After studying 2016 election polling, the American Association for Public Opinion Research reported that it found no evidence of “shy” Trump voters. More recent studies challenged that, suggesting such voters might exist. Survey firms that correctly predicted the 2016 election have argued that they did so because of how […] Read more »
We predicted the states Biden would win 100 days before the election
… We developed a forecast of each state’s presidential vote based primarily on three fundamental factors: each state’s presidential vote in 2016; state economic conditions through June of the election year, and state presidential approval ratings based on surveys conducted in June and July of this year. … If Biden […] Read more »