Pollster.com: Measurement Issues

Archive:
Measurement Issues

April 24, 2008

My NationalJournal.com column, a follow-up on the ongoing debate over counting the "popular vote" in the Democratic primary contest, is now online. In the column, I quoted a passage from an article by the late Austin Ranney about the intent...

April 10, 2008

The Popular Vote's Margin of Error

My NationalJournal.com column, which looks at the pollster concept of measurement error in the context of counting popular vote cast in the Democratic presidential contest, is now online....

March 28, 2008

"Bradley" Still in the Race?

Mickey Kaus has been arguing over the last week that the greater emphasis on racial issues in the Clinton-Obama nomination contest may have caused a return of the so-called Bradley-Wilder effect. The term refers to a pattern observed in the...

March 18, 2008

Can Polls Capture Race and Gender Bias?

Topic A today is obviously Barack Obama's speech on race and the Jeremiah Wright controversy and by extension, the larger issues of race and gender and how they affect perceptions and vote preferences in the presidential election. I have several...

December 18, 2007

"Electability" Surge or Order Effect?

Did the order of questions help create the result that led this morning's story by Susan Page about the new USA Today/Gallup poll? That possibility is worth considering, at least. Here is the headline and relevant text : Poll: Electability...

November 30, 2007

Dueling SC Results

After we posted the results from the Clemson University Palmetto poll of South Carolina on Wednesday, a reader noticed the exceptionally high undecided percentage reported for Democrats (49%) and concluded that "something's wrong with these numbers" (the Republican sample also...

November 15, 2007

Mellman on What Poll Responses Mean

We have been talking quite a bit lately about the difficulty pollsters have in identifying "likely caucus goers" in Iowa. Pollsters face similar challenges in any similarly low turnout primary (a phenomenon that is more common than you think)...

August 24, 2007

What's in a Name?

Are the national front-runners in the race for president - Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani - "coasting on high name ID?" That's the question that Gallup's Lydia Saad attempts to answer in a must-read analysis based on data from...

August 23, 2007

Al Gore - Ahead in Michigan?

Here's another item from last week worth a second look: Is Al Gore really leading in Michigan? When we linked to the latest Michigan survey from EPIC/MRA last week, we followed the lead of the Detroit News story and...

July 19, 2007

The CBS/NYT Interviewers

Kathy Frankovic, the polling director at CBS News, pays tribute to survey interviewers in her weekly column, which includes a rare public** description of the interviewing process behind the CBS News/New York Times poll: Interviewers for the CBS News/New...

July 19, 2007

Kentucky Governor: Undecided or Still Trying to Decide?

The latest automated SurveyUSA poll in the Kentucky Governor's race provides us with one of those classic conflicting poll stories that we just love here at Pollster.com, because it illustrates how small differences in methodology can have a profound...

June 14, 2007

Who would you NOT support?

In the comments section on my post about Hillary Clinton's support from women, reader timm0 asks: Has anyone thought to ask this question in a poll: I will read through the list of candidates. Please tell me which ones...

June 14, 2007

Living in "Pollsterland"

In her new "Poll Positions" column, CBS News polling directory Kathy Frankovic discusses the way pollsters love to ask questions that ask, "what if?" Although, as she points out, such questions were a favorite of polling pioneer George Gallup,...

May 07, 2007

Partisan variation in 2007 polling

The Newsweek poll released this weekend was quickly criticized for under-representing Republican partisans. For the adult sample, Newsweek had 22% Republicans and 35% Democrats, while for registered voters their numbers were 24% and 36% for Reps and Dems. Independents...

December 07, 2006

Open-Ends on the Dems

I wrote earlier this week about an open-ended presidential preference question from Gallup. In another free-for-today-only analysis, Gallup's Lydia Saad provides results from a different set of open-ends -- questions that provide no answer categories and allow respondents to answer...

December 05, 2006

Gallup's Open-ended 2008 Question

And speaking of why it may be premature to make much of 2008 general election match-up questions, the Gallup Poll has results out from a new survey that provides yet another way to ask about presidential preference: an open-ended question....

December 04, 2006

SurveyUSA's 50-State 2008 Presidential Pairings

Pollster.com reader SH wrote to ask what I think about the "SurveyUSA match ups on the front page of their website?" SH points out that, McCain and Giuliani are both unbeatable in the Electoral College. They show Giuliani beating Clinton...

October 16, 2006

Handicapping the House: Part I

With the addition of House race data to Pollster.com, it is a good time to talk about the difficulty of measuring the status of the race to control Congress at the district level. Political polling is always subject to a...

September 21, 2006

Another Day, Two New Polls

The morning brings two new surveys: One from CBS and the New York Times (article, results, CBS analysis, results on Iraq/terror, elections) and one from Bloomberg and the LA Times (article, results). Both surveys are lengthy and the accompanying analysis...

September 20, 2006

September 12, 2006

Question Order in CT

Another note on the Zogby Interactive Surveys. Crosstabs.org GOP pollster Rob Autry (whose company, Public Opinion Strategies, polls for Joe Lieberman) notes that Zogby's Connecticut survey asked a two-way vote question pitting Democrat Ned Lamont against Republican Alan Schlesinger before...

August 29, 2006

The NYT Reader's Guide to Polls

Jack Rosenthal, a former senior editor of the New York Times, filled in as the guest Public Editor" this past Sunday and devoted the column to a remarkable "Reader's Guide to Polls." The column (which also includes a kind reference...

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