WJC
(This essay originally was posted at the Conversation online site on 29 October 2020.) The Republican pollster Frank Luntz warned on Twitter and elsewhere the other day that if preelection polls in this year’s presidential race are embarrassingly wrong again, “then the polling industry is done.” It was quite the forecast. While it is possible […]
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…Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections is the story of polling flops, epic upsets, unforeseen landslides, and exit poll fiascoes in American presidential elections. It is now out from University of California Press. Here are FAQs about Lost in a Gallup, the seventh solo-authored book by W. Joseph Campbell. Q: Clever […]
Read More…The venerable Gallup Organization no longer conducts polls of U.S. presidential races. It dropped out after mistakenly estimating that Mitt Romney narrowly led President Barack Obama at the close of the 2012 campaign. Even though Gallup has quit election polling, a reservoir of its reporting remains available online; it’s a useful, even revealing resource about […]
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W. Joseph Campbell 