Questions tagged [polling]
Questions about general and technical aspects of polling: a sampling of opinions on a subject. Questions about SPECIFIC POLLING RESULTS should use [public-opinion] instead.
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How can we add by standard to opinion polls a "This is a stupid question" option? [closed]
Standard opinion polls include after the options related to the question also a "Don't know/No answer" option. But often responders who choose that option had a feeling that the poll was ...
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How did Edelman get honest statements for a poll conducted in China about the Communist Party?
In an interview of Xie Feng, Chinese ambassador to the U.S., at the 2023 Aspen Security Forum...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3KvXrhBevU
at timestamp 18:18, the ambassador seems to referring to ...
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What do polling experts have to say about Rassmussen Reports using a known white supremacist slogan in a poll? [closed]
Poor Scott Adams of Dilbert's fame did a monumental career seppuku by going on a rant about Black people. This was motivated by his interpretation of the findings of a poll by Rassmussen Reports.
1* ...
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Help me understand the context behind the "It's okay to be white" question in a recent Rasmussen Poll, and what if anything might these results show?
The New York Times' February 26, 2023 Newspapers Drop ‘Dilbert’ After Creator’s Rant About Black ‘Hate Group’ includes the paragraph:
In the video from Tuesday that led to backlash, Mr. Adams, who is ...
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How can the Citizens provide a Better Environment for Politicians when Facing the News Media?
I recently watched a rather old video from Jay Foreman that seems even relevant today:
Why don't politicians answer questions?
As he explains the reasons behind it, I wonder are we placing too much of ...
user45632
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How can we estimate the real support of continued resistance among Ukrainian citizens?
Inspired by the question How can we estimate the real support of the war among Russian citizens? and discussion therein.
Is there an estimate how many Ukrainians (on Ukrainian-controlled territory, ...
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How can we estimate the real support of the war among Russian citizens?
I've read that up to 70% of Russian citizens support an ongoing invasion to some extent. But these numbers were coming from government-affiliated organizations (VCIOM etc.); I think one can't really ...
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Why was the number of seats that RN gained in the 2022 legislative elections so poorly predicted by pollsters in the runup?
A France24 article from June says
RN’s performance at 90 seats is a “seismic event; an extraordinary result for them”, said Paul Smith, a professor of French politics at Nottingham University. “There ...
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Do self identified independents in the United States tilt conservative compared to non independents?
I have read polls that appear to say that those who don't explicitly back either party are more conservative ideologically than those who do.
A poll by Gallup shows that independents had a 35% ...
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How can parliament members in party-list systems faithfully represent their voters?
Suppose you are a newly-elected parliament member. You want to faithfully represent your voters, so you want to ask for their opinion on issues discussed in the parliament. If you are in a regional ...
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According to political scientists, what, if anything, are the benefits of election polling to a liberal democracy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy
About 3 months and a million news-years ago, the pollsters and election analysts were taking a kicking for not predicting the US elections accurately ...
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What, if anything, has been done to account for mail-in votes in 2020 exit poll data?
Traditionally, exit polls are done by physically presenting a subset of voters with an anonymous survey as they exit the polling place. In normal years, this provides a fairly good picture of the ...
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"Polling fails" observed in US elections quantified as right- or left-leaning? [closed]
Define a polling fail s.t.
a particular candidate C, running in ...
a particular election E, s.t. ...
pre-E polls (collectively, averaged) predict C to achieve vote share S0, but ...
results from E ...
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Does trust of strangers influence how likely someone is to answer a poll from a stranger?
I've always wondered about the type of people who take surveys. Who among us would take a random call in the middle of the day from a perfect stranger and spending the next 30 minutes answering dozens ...
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Why was the Economist model so sure Trump was going to lose compared to other models?
The Economist model never showed Trump as a clear favorite. In 2020, it said he has had less than 10% chance of winning the electoral college. In October 2020 it said that his chances were ...
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What does asterisk mean in RealClearPolitics polls?
I noticed that some polls on the RealClearPolitics site are marked with an asterisk.
What does the asterisk mean?
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Is it advantageous to lie in political polling answers?
When a person is asked questions by a poll, are there any rational reasons why they might lie with their answers in order to achieve their goals for the election?
For example, if they say they are ...
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How should I interpret the US election poll results conducted on Twitter? They seem to contradict polls conducted elsewhere
On a popular US poll twitter account, I found an interesting phenomenon. (Similar thing also has been happening on other US poll twitter accounts.)
Most of the polls it has (re)tweeted are favoring ...
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In the 538 Election Forecast, what is the difference between States that are: "the closest races" and "close to the tipping point"?
In 538's Election Forecast, states are highlighted as either having "the closest races" or being "close to the tipping point". What is the difference between these two categories?
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What is the name for a graph showing the estimated electoral vote share based on polling over time?
I'm looking for the right words to use to find a trend graph that shows how the US electoral vote count would look over time. "If the election were held today" kind of thing. This isn't ...
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What are the differences between these groups polled by FiveThirtyEight?
Polling by FiveThirtyEight categorizes polls by these groups:
A = ADULTS
RV = REGISTERED VOTERS
V = VOTERS
LV = LIKELY VOTERS
Is it correct that "LV" is a proper subset of "RV" ...
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Historical data on how the reliability of polling data depends on time remaining until a US presidential election
Just for entertainment, I wrote a program that simulates the US presidential election of 2020. (I was interested in seeing whether, for example, predictit's relatively low probability of Biden's ...
user5526
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How do US pollsters select people for their polls?
As we approach the presidential election, polling statistics seem to be referenced more than ever.
I've never had the opportunity to be included in polls.
This leads me to wonder;
Who is polled?
How ...
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Has anything been published about how YouGov determined the figures they are using for predicted turnout by age?
YouGov's multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) model is seen as one of the most reliable pre-election predictors of what results will look like in the UK. Their turnout predictions by ...
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What is an MRP poll, and is it more accurate than a conventional poll?
On Nov 27th, the polling company YouGov released an “MRP” poll that predicts the Conservative party winning a majority of 68 in the upcoming General Election. The poll has been treated as practically ...
CDJB♦
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Was the November 2019 polling about the Democratic Party's lead over Trump trustworthy?
In November 2019, many polls (such as this ABC/Washington Post poll from November 5th) claimed that the Democratic candidates had double-digit leads over Trump. In the 2016 elections, however, polls ...
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Is it possible to have a 22 point difference between polls taken over the same time period?
So I checking the state of the Democratic Nomination polls today and I saw this head scratcher:
Quinnipiac 10/17 - 10/21 21 28 15 10 5 ... Warren +7
CNN 10/17 - 10/20 34 19 16 6 ...
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In CBC's poll tracker, why do the probabilities of winning not add up to 100%?
In CBC's poll tracker at: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/, probabilities of winning the 2019 Canadian federal election are provided.
Currently, these are 11% Liberal ...
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What is the purpose of polls published by the organization that they are asking about which have leading/confusing questions?
My understanding of polling is that it is done to gauge public perception and opinion of political actors and policies in order to further shape a candidate's actions. In order to do that, one would ...
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Are there standardized ways to quantify political division?
Political division seems to be one of the main issues of our time, with countless articles, op-eds, and studies describing how the US and other countries (the UK comes immediately to mind) are ...
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Why are two trend-lines shown with Biden's poll results?
Looking at the poll numbers shown by realclearpolitics.com for the 2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination. Specifically, Biden's poll numbers seem to have two trend-lines instead of one. One hovers ...
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Which polls count towards DNC debate requirements (especially the fall debates)?
There are polls released almost daily pertaining to the Democratic nomination. In order to attend the September 12–13 round of debates, candidates need to get donations from 130,000 unique donors and ...
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Why are there no polls of Tom Steyer yet?
Tom Steyer, a billionaire, announced he was campaigning for president on July 9 and pledged to spend 100 million dollars of his own fortune to make that happen. Enough for a significant advertisement ...
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How to poll on a budget?
I would like to conduct a study examining the correlation between the Democratic candidates people support (and the policies these people espouse) and the positions of the candidates themselves (based ...
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How does Indonesia's unofficial presidential election tally finish with "head-snapping" speed?
The NPR News item and podcast In Indonesia, Joko Widodo Secures Another 5-Year Term As President quotes Indonesian president Joko Widodo, and continues:
"Let us reunite as family. Let us strengthen ...
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How to convey poll results with shifting demographics?
Poll results that try to show a change (or lack thereof) in an opinion over time are usually reported similarly to this answer:
As of mid-December 2018, 59% of Republicans thought it was 'very
...
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Evidence in support of highly myopic retrospective voting
I am reading Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. In Chapter 6 and 7, evidence is shown that "voters' retrospective assessments of the economy are quite myopic." ...
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How do the RealClearPolitics polling averages work?
It's common for poll analysts to discuss the RCP average, and well-known that the RCP average is a simple arithmetic mean of the polls under consideration.
But what are the other rules? In particular ...
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Who coined the term "herding" in the context of polling?
Nate Silver defines herding as
the tendency of polling firms to produce results that closely match one another, especially toward the end of a campaign
On November 5 2012 Drew Linzer wrote a post ...
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Are opinion polls always representative of the extreme opinions?
Opinion polls involve a choice. The people who are being asked to take the poll can say yes or no.
I suspect that this leads to such a significant amount of self-selection bias that I am starting to ...
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What are the main differences between UK and US (NEP) exit polls, methodologically?
The UK since 2001-2005 has apparently managed to get extremely accurate exit-polls:
Prior to 2001 the methods used had been different, and the accuracy of predictions based on exit polls was rather ...
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Is exit-polling more accurate than pre-election polling?
It has been claimed so in a comment which cites an FT article that I can't read (right now). Presumably the topic is interesting enough to have been discussed elsewhere.
I'm mainly interested in the ...
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Why are (public) political polls typically allowed even very close to the elections despite of their apparent disruptive effect on voters perception?
This is a follow-up of this accepted answer for the question: "Restricting polls because of the “Bandwagon effect”":
forbidding opinions for months would be detrimental to the development
of ...
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What might "behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging" mean, in the context of political action committee research?
The New York Times article Bolton Was Early Beneficiary of Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook Data includes the passage:
In the two years that followed, Mr. Bolton’s super PAC spent nearly $1.2 million ...
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Is there a democratic country that bans pre-election polls for a relatively long period before the actual elections? [duplicate]
This question is related to this answer:
To make a tactical vote, you need an estimate how much votes each
candidate is probably going to get. Only then, looking at the numbers,
you can decide that ...
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How predictive of the House Popular Vote is the Generic Ballot?
The site FiveThirtyEight has an "updating estimate of the generic ballot, based on polls that ask people which party they would support in a congressional election". My question is predictive of the ...
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Does polling during election campaigns bias policy selection or affect voter turnout? [duplicate]
Do individuals and parties running for a democratically elected office, in employing polls and focus groups to decide on, and tinker with, policy, end up choosing policy based on popularity rather ...
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To what extent do election polls affect the election results?
Has there been any rigorous research about what effect opinion polls have on the final election results? Do real life voters strategize their vote based on the polling averages?
I assume that there is ...
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Are there any methods that compensate for phenomenons such as Shy Tory factor and Bradley effect?
This is a follow-up question on this one (Why were pre-election polls and forecast models so wrong about Donald Trump).
The accepted answer tells us about the possible reasons such as Shy Tory Factor ...
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Do any jurisdictions take steps to protect people's votes from being "outed" by the polls?
It's well established that vote anonymity is an important part of representative democracy (discussed elsewhere on this site).
I was listening to the 538 podcast today, and they were discussing phone ...
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