Repairing Your Relationship With the Polls Post-2020
Few Americans made any conclusions on Election Night this year, having been forewarned by various experts, pundits, and candidates themselves that the election would likely take days to resolve. But one conclusion popped immediately: the polls were wrong. As more votes are counted, that conclusion has held, although the size of the miss gets smaller…
Read More2020 Has Changed A Lot of Things, and Exit Polling is No Exception
What do TV pundits, advocates, election data geeks, and politicians all have in common? They all want to know who voted, how they voted, and why they voted! Who wouldn’t? For years, the go-to way to do this has been through the national Exit Poll, the mythical deep-dive into the minds of the voters conducted…
Read MoreCelebrate National Voter Registration Day by Telling a Friend (or Two!)
We know that you are registered to vote because you’ve never missed an election and wouldn’t dream of not making your voice heard in this upcoming election. But that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook today, National Voter Registration Day. Take a moment or two to spread the word to your networks about the need…
Read MoreHow to Understand Polling of Underrepresented Communities (June 2020 Update)
Following the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and other Black Americans, hundreds of thousands have been agitating for overdue change in the United States and around the world. Unlike prior moments of protest around police brutality and racial injustice in recent memory, public opinion appears to be shifting very quickly…
Read MoreUsing polls in your media work: Making Polling Work for You
Throughout this series, we’ve been looking at a lot of polls. And let me tell you from my own experience as not-a-data person, after a certain point, polls tend to become just another series of numbers—either bereft of meaning, or confusing and contradictory. One of our challenges as media professionals is figuring out how to…
Read MoreUsing Polls to Inform your Media Strategy
Earlier this week, we covered how to assess the public opinion landscape of the issues we work on. Having an understanding of this big picture, now we are ready to use polling data to inform our media strategy. Developing an informed strategy is all about audience: defining who they are, learning as much as you…
Read MoreUsing Polls in your Media Work: Assessing the Public Opinion Landscape
In the last two weeks, we discussed how the polls performed during the midterms, putting into practice our recommendations on what to pay attention to when evaluating a new poll and how to interpret polling of underrepresented communities. With that foundational understanding of polling under our belt, we now turn to actually using public opinion…
Read More2018 Midterms: Did the polls fail—again?!
This post is part of an ongoing series on the ins and outs of polling. If you missed the previous posts on Five Things to Pay Attention to in a New Poll or Polling Underrepresented Communities, go back and read them! Our series will continue with posts from our comms colleagues on incorporating polls and…
Read MoreHow to Understand Polling of Underrepresented Communities
With five days before the midterms, many of us are preparing to peruse exit poll data hoping to understand how or why Americans voted one way or another. But we’ll do so with caution since recent elections have reminded us of the limitations of exit polling—primarily problems with representative sampling (because we won’t know what…
Read MoreFive Things to Pay Attention to in a New Poll
You’ve just read in the news: “77% of surveyed registered voters said that ‘Reducing the influence of special interests and corruption in Washington’ is either the most important or a very important issue facing the country.” We often see the media citing statistics on how the public feels about major issues. Where do they get…
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