The NYT Reader's Guide to Polls
August 29, 2006
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...[More...]
Even More on Measurement Error
July 27, 2006
Tuesday's post on a question wording experiment by Rasmussen Reports yielded some interesting comments and email. Here is a sample. The Rasmussen questions poses four answer categories (strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove or strongly disapprove) while the traditional job...[More...]
Rasmussen Update: A Lesson in Measurement Error
July 25, 2006
Although still playing catch-up on the "day job," I want to highlight something that has appeared without fanfare over the last week on Bush job approval page on the Rasmussen Reports website. Rasmussen, as most regular readers know, conducts surveys...[More...]
Words Worth Remembering
May 31, 2006
One of the great rewards of writing this blog is the incredible diversity of its readers -- everyone from ordinary political junkies to the some of the most respected authorities in survey research. I heard indirectly from one of the...[More...]
MP on NSA Polls on CBS Public Eye
May 26, 2006
Today I accepted an invitation to contribute to the "Outside Voices" feature on the CBS News blog "Public Eye." My post -- about lessons learned from the conflicting NSA telephone records polls -- is now up. Here's my bottom line:...[More...]
Generic Ballot: What Does it Measure?
May 25, 2006
Several readers have asked for my opinion on the so-called "generic vote" or "generic ballot" asked on national surveys to gauge Congressional vote preference. Given the obvious inability to tailor a national question to match 435 individual House races, this...[More...]
More on Rasmussen, Immigration & Third Parties
May 8, 2006
Today, thanks to pollster Scott Rasmussen, we have an update on that hypothetical third-party/immigration question he asked a few weeks ago on one of his automated surveys. Largely the result of a dialogue on that question involving Mickey Kaus and...[More...]
The Question That Answers Itself
April 21, 2006
A few weeks ago, our friend Mickey Kaus described a question asked on a recent Time Magazine poll as having "comically biased wording." I was not ready to be quite so harsh about that particular poll. Well, this week courtesy...[More...]
Rasmussen and Party ID - Part I
April 13, 2006
And speaking of putting the results of the new "automated" surveys under a microscope, we have some new data this week on party identification from automated pollster Scott Rasmussen. These data provide us with another opportunity to compare Rasmussen's results...[More...]
The Perils of Double Negatives
March 21, 2006
Gallup's David Moore has posted an analysis this morning (free for today only) with an important lesson on how to write - or perhaps, how not to write - survey questions. The lesson: Double negatives confuse respondents. Put another way,...[More...]
Gallup's Newport on Real Wiretapping Polls
February 24, 2006
Let's stay on the subject of the domestic eavesdropping issue, but go back to what real polls have to say about it. Today, Gallup's Frank Newport posted a highly relevant analysis looking at results from a number of different polling...[More...]
So When Is An Attitude Really An Attitude?
January 12, 2006
I want to add a few quick follow-up thoughts on yesterday's topic: The large differences across four national surveys in the number who offered an opinion on whether Samuel Alito should be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. What should...[More...]
And Pew Makes Four
January 11, 2006
Tonight we have another national survey to consider, this one released earlier today by the Pew Research Center (report, topline questionnaire , crosstab tables, complete PDF). While the Pew report, as usual, covers a wide variety of topics and is...[More...]
More on Rasmussen
December 7, 2005
I want to follow-up briefly on one point raised by yesterday's post on recent patterns in the Bush job rating. Professor Franklin's graphic showed that the automated Rasmussen tracking poll have shown a consistently higher approval percentage than other polls...[More...]
Polling the "Strategy for Victory"
December 5, 2005
A story on the front of Sunday's New York Times shines new light on the work on support for the Iraq War by Chris Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler that MP wrote about last summer. With the work of...[More...]
Columbus Dispatch Poll: Past Performance No Guarantee of Future Results
November 18, 2005
"Past performance is no guarantee of future results." We typically hear that disclaimer applied to financial investments, but in an era of declining response rates, it should apply just as well to polls. Last week, I neglected to include such...[More...]
California Propositions: Pollster Showdown
October 24, 2005
MP apologizes for sparse posting over the next day or so, as his "day job" with little time for blogging. In the meantime, readers may want to consider an emerging polling controversy in California, where pollsters have been asking about...[More...]
About that YouGov Poll of British Muslims
July 28, 2005
Reader BK emailed with a question about a survey of Muslims in the United Kingdom conducted for the London Daily Telegraph by the company YouGov just after the first London bombings. It asked respondents: "Do you think the bombing attacks...[More...]
Sneaky Plame Poll? Part II
July 27, 2005
So, as promised in Part I, let's continue to consider the post on Redstate.org last week by Jay Cost (aka the Horserace Blogger) that sharply criticized a recent ABC news poll on the Plame/Wilson/Rove imbroglio. Cost had some additional criticisms...[More...]
Sneaky Plame Poll? A Reality Check
July 21, 2005
Earlier this week, ABC News released poll results concerning the federal investigation of the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. The poll showed a sharp decline in the percentage of Americans who say that the White House is "fully...[More...]
Ideology as a Diagnostic, Part III
June 21, 2005
In Part I of this series, MP suggested that small differences in self-reported ideology as reported by four different pollsters during 2004 could be explained by either the composition of the people sampled or the way the respondents answer the...[More...]
Westhill/Hotline Poll on "Moral Values"
June 9, 2005
Today, the National Journal's Hotline released their latest Westhill Partners/Hotline Poll. Two things of note there for MP's readers: First, though the Hotline's daily news summaries are available only through a pricey subscription, National Journal is making the complete Westhill/Hotline...[More...]
Ideology as a "Diagnostic?" - Part I
June 6, 2005
A few weeks ago, blogger Gerry Daly (Dalythoughts) took a close look at self-reported ideology as reported on several national polls. Daly was mostly interested in whether a recent Washington Post/ABC survey sampled too few self-identified conservatives. In the process,...[More...]
More on Dueling Florida Polls
March 1, 2005
Another update on my last post on the mysterious difference in opinion on whether Jeb Bush should run for president as measured by two publicly released surveys of registered voters in Florida: One by the Quinnipiac University Poll and one...[More...]
Should Jeb Run...Or Not:?
February 25, 2005
The Hotline (subscription required) caught an intriguing polling conflict yesterday. A just released Quinnipiac poll of 1,007 Florida "voters," conducted February 18-22, showed 25% said yes when asked, "would you like Jeb Bush to run for President in 2008?" A...[More...]
R. Chung's "Bias" Charts
February 24, 2005
Having linked last week to a graphical representation of the President's job approval rating, I want to point to another set of graphics that takes Dr. Pollkatz's graph a step further. The esteemed "R. Chung," a blogger of sorts who...[More...]
When Respondents Lie
February 11, 2005
Yesterday, I talked to two junior high school students doing a school project on political polling. One of their questions was, "Do people tell the truth when they answer poll questions?" The answer is, they usually do though there may...[More...]
Measurement Error...in the Count
December 15, 2004
A quick break from exit polls... Alert JW, a resident of Washington State, asks this interesting question highly relevant to the ongoing recount in that state's race for Governor: Can a vote that is only "decided" by 42 votes out...[More...]
Pew on "Moral Values"
November 12, 2004
The Pew Research Center released a new study yesterday, a follow-up interview with 1203 voters who were originally surveyed in October that sheds interesting new light on the “moral values” controversy. Pew conducted an experiment with the question that asked,...[More...]
MoralValues
November 7, 2004
Saturday's New York Times had three articles on the other big exit poll issue this week: The question that showed 22% of voters choosing "moral values" as the issue they were most concerned about. In an op-ed piece, ABC News...[More...]
The Bush Landslide of 2000?
October 9, 2004
A number of readers have asked about a question that regularly appears in surveys by conducted jointly by CBS and the New York Times: "Did you vote in the 2000 presidential election, did something prevent you from voting, or did...[More...]
