Predicting 2016 State Presidential Election Results with a National Tracking Poll and MRP

Donald Trump’s widely unexpected victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has raised questions about the accuracy of public opinion polling, the aggregation of polling into probabilistic election forecasts and the interpretation of election polling by data analysts, journalists and the general public. While national-level polls on average proved as […] Read more »

Lies, Damned Lies and Partisanship

The latest Economist-YouGov national tracking poll includes a few great questions on public trust in statistics. What’s better is they were previously asked in 2014, which allows for a comparison of public views under the Obama and Trump administrations. Key takeaway: while Republicans views on government statistics have evolved – […] Read more »

Overcoming ‘End-Point Bias’: Liberals, Fox News and Arctic Sea Ice Trends

“End-point bias” is a well-known psychological tendency to interpret a recent short-term fluctuation as a reversal of a long-term trend. When scientists reported a significant increase in the extent of Arctic sea ice in 2013, a FoxNews.com story evoked end-point bias by contrasting the historically low previous year with the […] Read more »