WJC
(This essay was first posted at TheHill.com on November 12, 2021.) A refreshing departure from the blame-dodging tendency came the other day, following the outcome of the New Jersey governor’s race in which the incumbent Democrat, Phil Murphy, narrowly defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli. The result represented another setback for pollsters, whose pre-election surveys collectively estimated […]
Read More…(A version of this essay originally was posted at the Conversation online site on 20 May 2021.) More than six months after the acute polling embarrassment in the 2020 U.S. elections, survey experts examining what went wrong are uncertain about what led to the sharpest discrepancy between the polls and popular vote outcome since Ronald […]
Read More…(This essay originally was post at the Conversation online site on 21 October 2020.) The storyline of the presidential campaign seems to be solidifying, as polls show Joe Biden maintaining a sizable lead over President Donald J. Trump. But the lead may not be insurmountable, and the election is not over. The history of polling […]
Read More…(This essay was originally posted at the Conversation online site on 14 October 2020.) The question looms in nearly every U.S. presidential election, even in this year’s race: Could the polls be wrong? If they are, they likely will err in unique fashion. The history of election polling says as much. That history tells of […]
Read More…This is an abbreviated version of a commentary originally posted at The Hill; the commentary was drawn from Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections. It’s axiomatic that pre-election polls set the narrative for U.S. presidential campaigns. … polls are central to shaping conventional wisdom about the competitiveness of the races. But […]
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W. Joseph Campbell 