Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) blasted Nate Silver’s political forecasts in an interview with the Washington Post.
Said Reid: “He gave me a 16 percent chance of being reelected, he gave Heidi Heitkamp an 8 percent chance of being reelected, he gave Jon Tester a 34 percent chance of being reelected. So all polls are about like Nate Silver’s predictions: good sometimes, bad most of the time.”
Brendan Nyhan: “We’re still almost three years away from November 2016, but political journalists seem to want to fast-forward past the ongoing Washington stalemate to the next presidential election. How else can we explain the recent flurry of coverage for trial heat polls, which pit possible presidential contenders against each other in hypothetical general election matchups?”
“There’s just one problem: These polls–which exist mainly to generate press coverage for pollsters and fill space in the media–have zero predictive power at this point in the election cycle, don’t tell us anything we can’t learn from other metrics, and distract attention from the real action at this stage of the campaign.”
Public Policy Polling: “We did a poll last weekend in Colorado Senate District 3 and found that voters intended to recall Angela Giron by a 12 point margin, 54/42. In a district that Barack Obama won by almost 20 points I figured there was no way that could be right and made a rare decision not to release the poll. It turns out we should have had more faith in our numbers becaue she was indeed recalled by 12 points.”
A new Kantar poll finds the vast majority of Americans think polls are biased.
Key findings: 75% said they believe the polls are biased in some way, though they couldn’t agree in which direction, while 17% said they thought polls had a liberal bias and 4% said they were slanted toward conservatives.
Political polling firm Rasmussen Reports announced that
founder Scott Rasmussen left the company last month, in part, over “disagreements over company business strategies.”
National Journal: “A study published Monday reports that campaigns could use Twitter to successfully predict the winner of most races… The key measure, researchers from Indiana University found, was a candidate’s ‘tweet share,’ the percentage of total tweets about a race that mention them. The more often a candidate is mentioned on Twitter relative to their opponent, the study reported, the greater their chance for victory.”
“The findings were comprehensive: An analysis of tweets from the 2010 midterm elections found the data correctly predicted the winner in 404 of the 406 House races.”
Nate Silver: “But be wary of analysts who try to take this complexity argument too far. It’s true that any snapshot of public opinion from a poll is imperfect. It is not true that if you scratch only under poll results deeply enough, you will discover the American people actually take a clear side on abortion. By any objective measure, the country is conflicted.”
A new Gallup report details the reasons why the polling firm believes that its polls failed to predict President Obama’s victory in the November election, National Journal reports.
The Hill: “Gallup has partnered with the University of Michigan for a top-to-bottom review of its operations. In a written post-mortem, the pollster said it’s not averse to making “major revisions or even a replacement model” if needed to produce more accurate data.”
Joshua Green points out how many have claimed the Obama re-election campaign’s models proved more accurate than traditional tracking polls in the run up before the election.
“A number of Obama vets repeated this claim to me, so I asked them to provide some evidence to back it up, and they did. Here, for the first time, is a chart based on internal data that shows how the Obama campaign’s swing state model performed against the much maligned Gallup poll over the last several months of the race.”
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The National Republican Congressional Committee “is moving to reboot its polling operation after a messy 2012 cycle, the first concrete remedy taken by the Republican side since candidates and outside groups were left stunned on Election Day by results that their internal data never came close to predicting,” Politico reports.
The NRCC “is the first GOP entity to take specific steps to try to rectify the party’s widely acknowledged polling debacle. Republican strategists confirmed after the end of the 2012 race that a huge slice of their survey data was based on flawed assumptions, and failed to anticipate the diversity and scale of turnout on the Democratic side.”
Mark Blumenthal takes an extensive look at why Gallup’s polling was so wrong during the 2012 presidential election.
Nate Silver told Student Life that he might stop doing his election forecasts after the 2014 or 2016 elections should his projections actually influence the elections’ outcome.
Said Silver: “The polls can certainly affect elections at times. I hope people don’t take the forecasts too seriously. You’d rather have an experiment where you record it off from the actual voters, in a sense, but we’ll see. If it gets really weird in 2014, in 2016, then maybe I’ll stop doing it. I don’t want to influence the democratic process in a negative way.”
A new study “makes a startling suggestion about so-called ‘robo-polls’ in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, raising the question of whether these automated surveys may have been adjusted to match live-interviewer polls,” Gary Langer reports.
Key excerpt: “There is no difference in the accuracy of IVR polls and human polls when IVR polls occur after a human poll, but IVR polls do significantly worse if human polls are not conducted first. The apparent equivalence of IVR polls and human polls in the 2012 Republican primary appears to depend on human polls being conducted prior to the IVR polls.”
That said, the authors admit they “did not test the reverse
possibility, that traditional polls were altered to match automated
ones.”
Gallup will no longer be conducting polls for USA Today, the Washington Post reports.
“It’s not clear at this point which side broke off the arrangement or what the reason was” but USA Today says it “is in the final stages of negotiating an arrangement with another polling organization.”
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Harry Enten says there are five polling lessons we should take from the 2012 election season:
1. When likely and registered voter polls disagree in high turnout elections, you should usually go with the registered voter surveys.
2. Cellphones are generally needed for an accurate telephone poll.
3. Internet polling is the wave of the future.
4. Internal polls published publicly generally should not be trusted.
5. When state and national polls disagree, you should generally go with the state data.
Harper Polling launches this week with the goal of putting the Republican party “on parity with Democrats in the field of IVR polling – a term that stands for interactive voice response polling, commonly known as ‘robo-polling,'” Politico reports.
“For several cycles now, Democrats have benefited from a high-volume, relatively inexpensive flow of survey data from the company Public Policy Polling, which takes hundreds of polls in any given cycle checking up on individual races and national issue debates. Some of those surveys are released to the public, while others are conducted for private purposes by Democratic campaigns and interest groups.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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