Over the New Year’s holiday weekend, the New York Times published a 4,000-word article noting how some political polls, as well as the polling aggregators, overstated Republicans’ strength in key midterm races, feeding the narrative of a coming “Red Wave” that never came to be. But there’s a far simpler […] Read more »
Americans Largely Pessimistic About U.S. Prospects in 2023
Coming off several challenging years, Americans enter 2023 with a mostly gloomy outlook for the U.S. as majorities predict negative conditions in 12 of 13 economic, political, societal and international arenas. When offered opposing outcomes on each issue, about eight in 10 U.S. adults think 2023 will be a year […] Read more »
The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative
… Traditional nonpartisan pollsters, after years of trial and error and tweaking of their methodologies, produced polls that largely reflected reality. But they also conducted fewer polls than in the past. That paucity allowed their accurate findings to be overwhelmed by an onrush of partisan polls in key states that […] Read more »
2022’s Most Unexpected Winners and Losers
Generally, we don’t like to endorse zero-sum views of the world, but it was hard to miss the seesaw effect at play across the political landscape of 2022. So we offer for your amusement (or annoyance, depending on your political priors) 11 sets of paired winners and losers — the […] Read more »
The End of a Golden Age?
Key Points• American elections are becoming harder to predict.• Part of this is likely because of the immense changes and disruptions we are seeing not only in the United States, but in the world as a whole.• If the underlying social phenomena are less stable, then predictions become unavoidably chancier. […] Read more »
Why Democrats should like the early voting patterns in the Georgia Senate runoff
More than 1 million Georgians have voted early (absentee or in-person) ahead of Tuesday’s Senate runoff election. The compact nature of the early voting period for the runoff makes it difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison with what occurred during the November general election. Still, there are a number of […] Read more »