Polling

This is great: Civiqs lets you track public opinion on dozens of issues, candidates, and campaigns, so you can see how events affect public opinion in real time.

The dashboard is updated daily with current measures of President Trump’s job approval rating, the 2018 generic House ballot, favorable ratings of the Democratic and Republican parties, attitudes towards gun control, and much more. There are no gaps between polls because polling is done daily. All of the results can be filtered and tabulated by age, race, gender, education, and party identification.

Despite the perceived failures in recent high-profile elections, a  new study in Nature Human Behaviour — conducted across 45 countries over the last 75 years — finds that there is no evidence that election polling is any less accurate now than it was in the past. If anything, polling may be becoming more accurate.

Looking at the crosstabs of the new USA Today/Suffolk poll, there’s a white Republican woman from the Midwest who says she’s never heard of Donald Trump.

A new Public Opinion Quarterly article finds that late movement to Donald Trump and a lack of education weighting were the best explanations for the state polling error in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Interestingly, there is little evidence that “shy voter” responses were an important contributor to polling error.

Pew Research: “These probabilistic forecasts can give potential voters the impression that one candidate will win more decisively and may even lower the likelihood that they vote… The use of such probabilistic forecasts was a constant in coverage of the 2016 presidential race, with an average of 16 mentions per day in cable news broadcasts, according to the study. And at least in 2016, outlets with more liberal audiences featured more coverage. Forecasters uniformly favored Hillary Clinton to capture the White House, with odds ranging from 70% to 99%.”

“The new study finds that numbers like these can leave people with the impression that the race is far less competitive than when they see polling data presented as the percentage of the vote they are expected to get – something familiar to the public.”

“When the wave comes, it’s always underestimated in the polls. That is the reason that Republicans are ducking for cover.”

— A conservative political strategist, quoted by the Washington Post.

Gallup announced it is discontinuing its daily tracking poll of presidential approval, the latest cutback of the company’s public polling.

The poll will now be done weekly.

Nate Cohn: “The Alabama special election is forcing pollsters to confront just about every major challenge in survey research. There’s more uncertainty than usual about who will turn out to vote, and a candidate whose unpopularity may make his committed voters unwilling to admit their support to a pollster. And looming over it all is a big chunk of voters torn between their party and their misgivings about their party’s nominee. No poll can really predict what they’ll do.”

Politico: “The departures of AP and Fox from the 20-year alliance of news organizations that have commissioned and reported national and state exit polls doesn’t necessarily sound the death knell for exit polling. The four remaining networks in the pool — ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News — are locked into the current exit poll regime through the next presidential election.”

“But they will be facing unprecedented competition — from the AP and Fox News, among others — and the future beyond 2020 remains uncertain.”

Nate Cohn: “A year after polls broadly overestimated Hillary Clinton’s strength in the decisive Rust Belt battleground states, top pollsters and analysts across the survey industry have reached a broad near-consensus on many of the causes of error in the 2016 presidential election. But so far, public pollsters — typically run by news outlets and colleges — have not changed much about their approach. Few if any of the public pollsters that conducted surveys ahead of Tuesday’s elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey appear to have adopted significant methodological changes intended to better represent the rural, less-educated white voters who pollsters believe were underrepresented in pre-election surveys.”

“On the other hand, private pollsters — typically employed by campaigns and parties — have already begun to make changes. This is especially true among Democrats stunned by Donald Trump’s upset victory, but Republicans are making changes as well. The adjustments are already playing out in Virginia, where pollsters will have one of their first chances to put postelection shifts to the test.”