What is the Sampling Error for Exit Polls?
The newly posted methodology information on the National Election Pool (NEP) website (for states and the national survey) provides much more guidanceRead More…
Category: Sampling Error
About Those Tracking Surveys
So admit it. At least once a day, possibly more often, you’ve been checking in on the various rolling-average tracking surveys. Most of us are. IfRead More…
NYT: Why Can’t Pollsters Agree?
As a companion piece to their poll story, the New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg weighs in this morning on why the polls disagree. It touches on much of wRead More…
What does the “margin of error” mean?
A good place to start is with the following three posts on the random variation inherent in all sample surveys and what a consumer can do to minimize Read More…
So What Should a Junkie Do?
So what are we to make of polling, given that it allows for a wide variance of results at this point in the election? For average voters trying to maRead More…
More Divergent Than They Should Be?
Picking up where I left off on the last post, let’s start with the basic theory of random sampling. If we draw a series of perfect random samples, Read More…
Divergent Polls
Monday’s edition of National Journal’s Hotline listed seven headlines from the last few days that “say it all,” as they put it, about recent politRead More…