In my last post I focused on how ill-advised it is to make any predictions for 2012 based on unemployment rates in the summer of 2011.  As it turns out, even when measured closer in time to the election, the unemployment rate still is not a good predictor of...

A full fifteen months out from the 2012 election, we are starting to see a bit of hand-wringing among Democrats and signs of optimism among Republicans, largely on the basis of President Obama's tepid approval numbers and the downward stickiness of the unemployment rate.  In the spirit of "Don't Get...

The votes are now in for Wisconsin's "non-partisan" Supreme Court race, which featured incumbent David Prosser, a former Republican state legislator, and Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, who worked for both Democratic and Republican Attorneys general.  Prosser was clearly the favored candidate by conservative and Republican groups, and, despite her...

The current discussion of the enthusiasm gap raises the issue of partisan differences in interest and motivation but also seems to have implications for partisan differences in presidential approval. Specifically, an  undercurrent of contemporary discussions of the enthusiasm gap is that Democratic prospects are somewhat handicapped due to relatively anemic support for the President Obama...

Despite the fact that the American public (or at least the politically interested among us) are voracious consumers of publicly available polls, it is not uncommon to hear a refrain something along the lines of "you can't trust polls."  Yet, polls abound and play a prominent role in all manner...

Given the sheer volume of polling data made public every day, and given that there sometimes seems to be a lot of variation in what the polls say about individual races, it is not surprising to hear doubts expressed about the overall quality of political polling.  Charlie Cook, for...