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A Real-Time Polling Dashboard

March 13, 2018 at 7:38 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Polling

No, Polling Is Not Broken

March 12, 2018 at 5:17 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Polling

Someone Has Never Heard of Donald Trump

March 1, 2018 at 5:12 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Polling


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Why Trump’s Tax Law Bump Wasn’t as Big as It Seemed

February 26, 2018 at 8:37 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

This piece is only available to Political Wire members.

The latest CNN poll shows President Trump’s approval rate tying its all time low of 35%, but the polling averages don’t show much of a dip at all. In fact, since the beginning of the year, Trump’s approval has bounced back from it’s low mark in December. This has generally been attributed to Republicans passing a tax bill.

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Filed Under: Members, Polling

2016 Polling Misses Explained

February 9, 2018 at 2:32 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Polling

Study Finds Election Forecasts Lower Voter Turnout

February 6, 2018 at 12:07 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.”

Filed Under: Polling

Where Polls Live Forever

January 31, 2018 at 2:09 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Cornell University political scientist Peter Enns, who also heads up the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, joins Chris Riback for a discussion on how American views have evolved — in big ways and really nuanced ways — over time on some of our biggest issues: immigration, criminal justice, religion, politics, and more.

Enns is also author of Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World.

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Thanks to the Cook Political Report for sponsoring this episode.

Filed Under: Conversations, Polling

Quote of the Day

January 14, 2018 at 8:32 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“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.

Filed Under: Polling

Gallup Will End Daily Tracking Poll

January 3, 2018 at 2:48 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Polling

Why Alabama Polls Aren’t Much Help

December 12, 2017 at 8:43 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.”

Filed Under: Polling

Is This the Beginning of the End for Exit Polls?

December 9, 2017 at 12:47 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.”

Filed Under: Polling

Pay Little Attention to the Alabama Polls

December 3, 2017 at 2:40 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Politico: “Roy Moore appears to have inched back in front of Democrat Doug Jones in the latest Alabama Senate election polls, according to the oft-cited RealClearPolitics average — a change in fortune from mid-November, when sexual misconduct allegations against Moore first surfaced. The reality? No one really has a clue about where things stand with Alabama voters in the December 12 special election.”

“For all the national attention and the millions of dollars spent to win the seat, there’s relatively little public polling in the contest. Only three public surveys in the average have been conducted since the Thanksgiving holiday, and odds are you’ve never heard of two of the three pollsters. And that’s precisely the problem. The most important and closely watched election in the nation is taking place in the equivalent of a polling black box.”

G. Elliot Morris: The media stopped covering Roy Moore’s sex scandal, then he bounced back.

Filed Under: 2017 Campaign, Polling Tagged With: AL-Sen

Many Pollsters Haven’t Changed Anything

November 6, 2017 at 1:08 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

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.”

Filed Under: Polling

Trump’s Approval Among Republicans May Be Overstated

July 20, 2017 at 2:48 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

This piece is only available to Political Wire members.

New research from Emory University suggests that people who identify as Republican may stop doing so if they disapprove of President Trump. If true, the result of this would be to create a false sense in his approval numbers among Republicans. Instead of his approval holding steady, as most polling suggests, it could be falling.

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Filed Under: Members, Polling, White House

What the Generic Ballot Tells Us About 2018

June 16, 2017 at 5:20 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

This piece is only available to Political Wire members.

The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Democrats with a six point lead over Republicans, 46% to 40%. The FiveThirtyEight average has Democrats up by seven points, 46% to 39%.

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Filed Under: 2018 Campaign, Members, Polling

U.K. Turnout Models Ignored Surge In Youth Vote

June 9, 2017 at 10:26 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Nate Silver: “The 2017 election therefore seems to be a case of an overcorrection. The pollsters apparently did a good enough job of weighting the raw samples properly, which got them fairly close to the right outcome. Then on top of that, some of them gave extra weight to the Conservatives through their turnout models. As a result, they discounted signs of a youth-driven Labour turnout surge. As was the case in the U.S. with Bernie Sanders, younger voters turned out in a big way for Labour’s left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn.”

“It’s one thing for a pollster to get an outcome wrong because voters fail to turn out when they say they will. But if voters tell you they’re going to turn out, you ignore them, and they show up to vote anyway, you really don’t have much of a defense.”

Filed Under: Foreign Elections, Polling

Conventional Wisdom May Be Contaminating Polls

May 9, 2017 at 11:39 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Nate Silver: “When the conventional wisdom tries to outguess the polls, it almost always guesses in the wrong direction. Many experts expected Le Pen to beat her polls. Currency markets implied that she had a much greater chance — perhaps 20 percent — than you’d reasonably infer from the polls. But it was Macron who considerably outperformed his numbers instead.”

“While this was somewhat amusing — the one time the experts decided to take the nationalist candidate’s chances really seriously was the time she lost by 32 points — it should actually worry you, even if you’re a ‘fan’ of polling and data-driven election forecasting. It’s a sign that the polls may be catering to the conventional wisdom, and becoming worse as a result.”

Filed Under: Polling

The French Election Polls Nailed It

April 24, 2017 at 8:09 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

This piece is only available to Political Wire members.

Ahead of the first round of France’s presidential election, there were a lot of concerns about the accuracy of the polls.

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Filed Under: Foreign Elections, Members, Polling Tagged With: France

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.

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