Independent, data-driven analysis of politics, public opinion polls, and elections. From author, journalist, and pollster G. Elliott Morris. Click to read Strength In Numbers, by G. Elliott Morris, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Subscribe to Strength In Numbers
Independent, data-driven analysis of politics, public opinion polls, and elections. From author, journalist, and pollster G. Elliott Morris. Click to read Strength In Numbers, by G. Elliott Morris, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
FiftyPlusOne - Latest Political Polls and Averages
A comprehensive list of polls and polling averages for elections and politician approval.
FiftyPlusOne - Latest Political Polls and Averages
A comprehensive list of polls and polling averages for elections and politician approval.
Substack Data | Chaotic Era
A newsletter about politics, media, and online influence in Democracy’s chaotic era. Written by Kyle Tharp.
Why does every poll seem to show a tossup now?
Campaigns see internal polls as tools for fundraising
Ground News
The biggest source for breaking news around the world. Compare headlines across the political spectrum using media bias ratings driven by data.
Media Ownership Monitor
Mass media influences how facts are viewed and debated in a society, contributing to crafting its public opinion. Independence and pluralism...
Why Are American Presidential Election Campaign Polls so Variable When Votes Are so Predictable?
As most political scientists know, the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election can be predicted within a few percentage points (in the popular vote), based on information available months before the election. Thus, the general election campaign for president seems irrelevant to the outcome (except in very close elections), despite all the media coverage of campaign strategy. However, it is also well known that the pre-election opinion polls can vary wildly over the campaign, and this variation is generally attributed to events in the campaign. How can campaign events affect people's opinions on whom they plan to vote for, and yet not affect the outcome of the election? For that matter, why do voters consistently increase their support for a candidate during his nominating convention, even though the conventions are almost entirely predictable events whose effects can be rationally forecast? In this exploratory study, we consider several intuitively appealing, but ultimately wrong, resolutions to this puzzle, and discuss our current understanding of what causes opinion polls to fluctuate and yet reach a predictable outcome. Our evidence is based on graphical presentation and analysis of over 67,000 individual-level responses from forty-nine commercial polls during the 1988 campaign and many other aggregate poll results from the 1952–1992 campaigns. We show that responses to pollsters during the campaign are not generally informed or even, in a sense we describe, "rational." In contrast, voters decide which candidate to eventually support based on their enlightened preferences, as formed by the information they have learned during the campaign, as well as basic political cues such as ideology and party identification. We cannot prove this conclusion, but we do show that it is consistent with the aggregate forecasts and individual-level opinion poll responses. Based on the enlightened preferences hypothesis, we conclude that the news media have an important effect on the outcome of Presidential elections–-not due to misleading advertisements, sound bites, or spin doctors, but rather by conveying candidates' positions on important issues. Winner of the Pi Sigma Alpha Awardfor the best paper at the previous year's meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association. Replication data at the Harvard Dataverse: [https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/I7GIKD](https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/I7GIKD).
An Assessment of the Causes of the Errors in the 2015 UK Gseneral Election Opinion Polls
Summary The opinion polls that were undertaken before the 2015 UK general election underestimated the Conservative lead over Labour by an average of 7 percentage points. This collective failure led politicians and commentators to question the validity and utility of political polling and raised concerns regarding a broader public loss of confidence in survey research. We assess the likely causes of the 2015 polling errors. We begin by setting out a formal account of the statistical methodology and assumptions that are required for valid estimation of party vote shares by using quota sampling. We then describe the current approach of polling organizations for estimating sampling variability and suggest a new method based on bootstrap resampling. Next, we use poll microdata to assess the plausibility of different explanations of the polling errors. Our conclusion is that the primary cause of the polling errors in 2015 was unrepresentative sampling.
The Internet Doesn’t Have to Be Bad for Democracy
A new form of online survey uses crowdsourcing and data visualization to reveal the hidden nuances in partisan debates.
‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
Why ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ isn't as great a thinking tool as you might think.
The Twilight of the Polls? A Review of Trends in Polling Accuracy and the Causes of Polling Misses
Polls have had a number of high-profile misses in recent elections. We review the current polling environment, the performance of polls in a historical context, the mechanisms of polling error, and the causes of several recent misses in Britain and the US. Contrary to conventional wisdom, polling errors have been constant over time, although the level of error has always been substantially beyond that implied by stated margins of error. Generally, there is little evidence that voters lying about their vote intention (so-called ‘shy’ voters) is a substantial cause of polling error. Instead, polling errors have most commonly resulted from problems with representative samples and weighting, undecided voters breaking in one direction, and to a lesser extent late swings and turnout models. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for polling both in terms of fixing the problems identified and new approaches to understanding public opinion.
Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization
Today, social media platforms hold the sole power to study the effects of feed-ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants’ feeds in real time and used this method to conduct a preregistered 10-day field ...
Hyperpolitics? Yes, Please • Protean Magazine
Alex Colston reviews Anton Jäger's "Hyperpolitics," filling in gaps in the book's short argument and arguing for the importance of political formations and activities independent of official political society.
Government Ratings - Nira Data
Track global public opinion, political sentiment, and trust in government with insights from the 2025 Global Political Opinion Report.
“Writing is hard.” Thrilled to share that this simple idea led to a new paper in Political Analysis! Where most text methods focus on content, I test if expression is also effortful action. I find simple measures like character counts reveal attitudes and predict voting. cup.org/4cUmoXi 1/
