There are two questions to ask when evaluating a political prediction, whether it’s from Nate Silver, a pollster, an academic or your favorite Yahoo News predictions blog: A) How useful was the prediction the day before the election? B) How useful was the prediction the day after the election? [cont.] […] Read more »
The Role of the Rising American Electorate in the 2012 Election
Barack Obama won because he recognized a New America. The President managed only 39 percent of the white vote, the lowest white percentage recorded for a winning national candidate, and suffered a 12-point swing against him among independent voters, but won both the popular vote and an Electoral College landslide […] Read more »
Misreading Election 2012
Postelection talk of “lessons learned” is often exaggerated and misleading, and so it is in 2012. A week after President Obama won re-election, two themes are dominant. First, that Mr. Obama kept his job because key elements of his base—notably young people, African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans—turned out for him. Second, […] Read more »
The Little-Known Pollster That Bested All the Others
The venerated Gallup Poll took a beating this year for being such an outlier in its predictions of who would win the presidency, and the New York Times’s Nate Silver has now served up further evidence that the firm has lost its mojo. … What pollster nailed its predictions? A […] Read more »
GOP Grapples With Embarrassing Polling Failures
… Before Election Day, Republicans confidently predicted they would pick up seats in both chambers of Congress, and that Mitt Romney would win the White House. The results shattered those predictions, and with them any sense of security in the numbers coming out of some of the best-regarded polling firms […] Read more »
Young Voters in the 2012 Presidential Election
An estimated 23 million young Americans under the age of 30 voted in the 2012 presidential election which is on par with voting rates during the 2008 presidential election. CIRCLE estimates that youth voter turnout was 50 percent of those (18-to-29) eligible to vote. … This CIRCLE fact sheet summarizes […] Read more »