Pollsters

Now that the election season is upon us, people are probably dreading the inevitable phone calls from polling agencies, which always seem to come at t...

Because they do tons of polls and the same kinds of questions over and over, pollsters have a very good idea in advance of writing their questions for any given poll what phrases or even individual words will trigger a more positive answer.

Thanks to a hit piece by one of those Beltway pseudo-"bipartisans" we can now state conclusively what many of us have long suspected: Occupy Wall Street speaks for the American majority. We've got the polling numbers to prove it. We now know where the real center lies.

Our country is in the midst of a clash between two competing moral visions, between those who believe in the common good, and those who believe individual good is the only good. It's time our leaders in Washington listen to someone other then themselves.

With Barack Obama's reelection announcement and the ever more frequent public statements from Republican primary contenders, the 2012 election cycle i...

Polls have come to dominate the media's horse race coverage of political campaigns. Pundits and reporters constantly use them to tell us who's...

The White House and Democrats want this election to be a "choice," but midterms are rarely ever "choice" elections -- that's what Presidential elections are for. Instead, midterms are a referendum on the President and the party in power.

The political pendulum has swung toward the Republicans and at this point there is almost nothing that Democrats and the president can do to alter the overall course of the midterm elections.

Will this be the year that "cell phone only" voters wreak havoc on the results of pre-election polls? And does the cell phone only problem doom pollsters that depend on automated, recorded voice methodologies?

Well, here's a story you don't read every day: A pollster for Florida Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson is running as a Florida Tea Party candidate...

Markos ("Kos") Moulitsas has opted to "part ways" with DailyKos polling partner Research 2000 and seek "a new polling partner to finish out this elect...

50% don't think President Obama deserves re-election 65% think most members of Congress don't deserve re-election 28% say they support anti-big govern...

An unusually low turnout in Tuesday's Illinois Democratic primary worries Democratic pollsters who fear that a strong Republican turnout -- combined w...

My column for this week asks a tough question: What defines a "partisan" poll? A dozen years ago, the answer was easy: A poll paid for by a campaign o...

Some unexpected results in Tuesday night's four high-profile elections raise the question of which pollsters got the races right and which got them wr...

Last week, I [linked](http://pollster.com/blogs/dr_george_gallup_and_the_liter.php) to an [article](http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.a...

Just to shake things up a bit, here's a post on a polling controversy from 1936. Earlier this week, Investor's Business Daily ran a fascinating biogra...

A regular reader wrote recently to ask if we could compare the polls we have entered at this point in the current electorate cycle (2009 to 2010) to t...

Doug Usher is Senior Vice President and Research Director at Widmeyer Communications. Margie Omero is President and founder of Momentum Analysis LLC ...

The odds are good that after Obama's health care address, at least two television networks will release results from "instant reaction" surveys. Odds are almost as good that pundits will misread those surveys.

"So who was the most accurate pollster yesterday?" If I had $100 for every time I've been asked that question by a reporter on the Wednesday morning a...

The Strategic Vision story is getting far more interesting. In the wake of a public reprimand from the American Association for Public Opinion Researc...

As noted in the 'outliers' post, MyDD's Jonathan Singer flagged an odd inconsistency in a recent Rasmussen Reports survey of Minnesota. They asked lik...