There have been rash of 50-state polls coming out recently: Survey Monkey (with the Washington Post), Ipsos (with Reuters), and Morning Consult all released polls within the week. For the sake of this article think of polling as a two-step process, researchers: collect responses from a sample of the population […] Read more »
Is A 50-State Poll As Good As 50 State Polls?
It sounds like a riddle of sorts: Is one giant poll of all 50 states the same thing as 50 small polls, one for each state, added together? If this seems like an odd question, it’s because it hadn’t really come up before this year. CONT. Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight See […] Read more »
The Age of Post-Truth Politics
… It is possible to live in a world of data but no facts. Think of how we employ weather forecasts: We understand that it is not a fact that it will be 75 degrees on Thursday, and that figure will fluctuate all the time. Weather forecasting works in a […] Read more »
Do not confuse voter intention and probability of victory
On Tuesday the Monkey Cage at the Washington Post published an article, “Do betting markets outperform election polls? Hardly.” The article suffers from two common confusions around both prediction markets and forecasting in general. CONT. David Rothschild (Microsoft Research), PredictWise Read more »
How to read the election polls — and keep your sanity — in two easy steps
… What exactly is a “random walk”? And why would it matter to ordinary people following the campaign? Answering these questions produces two simple but important lessons for reading election polls. A random walk means this: It is very hard to predict the future movement in some quantity from its […] Read more »
Fox Failed Statistics in Explaining Its G.O.P. Debate Decision
Will Rick Perry miss the main Republican debate Thursday night because he’s unpopular or because he’s unlucky? This turns out to be a far more difficult question that you might realize, and it’s one that apparently eludes the Fox News decision desk. CONT. Justin Wolfers (U. of Michigan), New York […] Read more »