Over the past several years, pollsters have been working to understand the best approach to conducting survey research in a world where no single technology allows them to reach the entire public. Most reputable polling organizations have adapted their national telephone polls to call both landlines and cell phones in...

Whether you want to call the 2010 midterm elections a wave or a tsunami, Scott Brown was at the leading edge of the Republican tide when he scored an unexpected victory over Martha Coakley in the January special election for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts. But while Brown scored...

The National Election Pool did not conduct an exit poll for the Massachusetts gubernatorial race this year. However, I led a team of students at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst to sample voters at 18 precincts across the state today. You can find specifics on our Massachusetts Exit Poll survey,...

On Tuesday, the Pew Hispanic Center released a report suggesting that Hispanic turnout will likely drop significantly in the upcoming midterm elections. The report has generated a fair amount of news coverage, but the coverage has also been criticized for failing to provide sufficient...

There is little doubt that 2010 will be a bad year for Democrats, with many Democratic incumbents likely to lose to Republican challengers in both House and Senate races. The real question is how bad it will be -- will enough Democratic incumbents lose to shift control of the House...

Brendan Nyhan posted yesterday about his article in the just-released special issue of The Forum on the politics of health care reform. There are several compelling articles in the issue by notable scholars, including Representative David Price.

My own contribution to the issue (along with co-author David Eckles)...

When I moved from DC to Amherst in August I was looking forward to the charm of a small New England college town and the relative affordability of housing (compared to prices inside the beltway, at least). But what I knew I'd miss the most was living at the center...

A friend sent me a couple of links earlier pointing to pundits and pollsters who are taking last night's results as evidence for the merits of IVR polling. First off, as Mark noted earlier, it is a bit too early to be making such comparisons. With regard...

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on how the public's aversion to losses (or loss aversion) limits the extent to which they are willing to favor health care reform. That piece and some others that preceded it are worth reading to understand one reason that...

Political pundits generally settle on a shared view of a campaign, one that includes a story about which groups each candidate worked hardest to win votes from. But how does the general public perceive the candidates' campaign strategies?

In 2008, I included a battery on the Cooperative Congressional Election...

A few weeks ago, I highlighted some preliminary findings from a paper written by myself and Stephen Ansolabehere for this week's AAPOR conference. The paper is now finished and you can check out a copy

The survey research community is focusing intently on the challenges posed by the fast-growing share of Americans who are cell-phone-onlys (CPOs). In fact, there are 40 papers being presented on the topic at the AAPOR conference next month. One of the practical issues faced by pollsters is whether...

Steve Ansolabehere and I have been working over the past few weeks on a paper we are writing for the AAPOR conference next month. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll share some of our preliminary findings here and I wanted to lead off today by presenting some comparative...

Anyone who has ever watched Deal or No Deal has noticed that some people are far more willing to take risks than others. Not only does a person's tolerance for risk affect their decisions about whether to open another suitcase on a game show, but it also influences...

This post is part of Pollster.com's week-long series on Stan Greenberg's new book, Dispatches from the War Room.

I've enjoyed reading through Greenberg's thought-provoking book over the last several days. The exercise has led me to think not just about the relationship between pollsters and their clients, but also...

Frequent Pollster.com readers will know that the Cell Phone Only (CPO) population is a subject I blogged on frequently during the campaign. One of the reasons for this interest is because there is still a lot we don't know about CPOs at this point (I...

Back in December, a SurveyUSA poll drew some attention and fueled the hype regarding the large crowds expected for Tuesday's inauguration ceremonies. In that poll, an incredible 12% of respondents reported that they were planning to "attend the inauguration of President Obama in Washington, DC." That would translate...

Set aside for a moment the...

Throughout the campaign, much was made of the tremendous ground organization that Obama had built. Yet, according to the exit polls, Obama's organization did not contact a higher percentage of voters than Kerry's did in 2004. In both 2004 and 2008, voters were asked "Did anyone call you or talk...

Now that most of the national vote has been tabulated, we can get a pretty good sense of which pollsters came closest to pegging the final popular vote. As Mark mentioned in an earlier post, several others have done this already, but I thought I'd create...