John Sides

Tom Holbrook reports: Jay DeSart and I have done some work over the years on using September state-wide trial-heat polls to predict presidential election outcomes in the states. We pool state-level data from 1992-2008 and use the Democratic candidate’s share of the two-party vote in state-level September polls (averaged across publicly available polls), a lagged (four […]

The jobs report is out and the numbers are, by the standards of the past few years, pretty good.  Could this help Obama on Election Day? The shortest answer is: probably not much.  In my earlier post on late changes in the economy, I noted this line from Robert Erikson’s and Christopher Wlezien’s analysis of […]

In my snap predictions last night, I was wrong about one thing: the post-debate insta-polls definitely suggest that most debate viewers believed Romney won: CNN had it 67-25.  A second poll of uncommitted voters conducted by CBS and Knowledge Networks scored in 46-22 for Romney.  (My second prediction—that the media would reach the same conclusion—turned […]

Courtesy of Thomas Holbrook.  More discussion is in his post.  These numbers show why, based on recent history, it would be unusual for the debates alone to close the gap between Obama and Romney. [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

In 2010, I complained when Charlie Cook suggested that somehow public campaign polls were worse than the private polls shared mainly with reporters and observers like him.  Cook wrote: The far more sophisticated polling is done by top-notch professional polling firms for campaigns, parties and major business and labor organizations. These polls are considerably more […]

The upcoming presidential debates may not move the polls very much.  But if they do, credit may be due not to the candidates who have so assiduously prepared and practices, but to the media personalities commenting on the debate. Consider this experiment.  In 2004, Kim Fridkin and other researchers at Arizona State University showed people […]

Among Republicans, but not Democrats,women were more feminine than men were masculine, and these very factors related to the accuracy of political party judgments.Moreover, the sex-typicality of facial cues mediated the effect of politician sex and party on perceivers’ judgments of political party affiliation. As predicted therefore, political affiliation was strongly related to gendered facial […]

Gwen Ifill: Gallup polls going back decades show precious little shift in established voter trends before and after debates. Chris Cillizza: …there are relatively few examples of times in which the general election presidential debates fundamentally altered the course of a race. Miranda Green: Presidential debates rarely have much effect on election outcomes. It’s nice […]

Following on our posts, see this from political scientists Scott Alder and John Wilkerson.  They note that, once you take into account the importance of the bills passed (proxied here with their length), the 112th Congress doesn’t look all that bad: Moreover, this Congress may conclude with a flurry of activity: Compared to unified governments, […]

In the 2012 presidential primaries, a funny thing happened with the polls.  By and large, the errors of pre-election polls—that is, the difference between the polls and the primary election outcomes—did not depend much on whether the polls used live interviewers or recorded voices.  That is, robo-polls had no more error than polls with live […]