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Nate Silver has gotten a lot of press for his near perfect election night predictions. In 2008 Silver gained popularity and influence after he called 49 out of 50 states. Many pundits were predicting that Silver would crash and burn in 2012. Instead, he outperformed his 2008 predictions and now that Florida has been called for president Obama, Silver can tout a perfect record 50 out of 50 states called correctly.How did Silver do it?Only Likely Voters Matter: This is one obvious reason SilverÂ’s method outshines everyone else. Anything other than likely voter models is useless information. This is key....

RUSH: Earlier this week, Gallup came out with that 9,000-plus sample poll, with a margin of error of only plus/minus 1%. Nine thousand people. It was a poll that asked partied affiliation, party ID. It came up with plus-three Republican. As of now, party ID... I don't know if it was likely voters, registered voters, adults, whatever. I don't remember what it was, but it was some classification of voters. Now, in 2008 the same poll had Democrats plus 12. Exit polling had Democrats plus 12. The polling data that everybody's going by, all these polls that show it neck...

RUSH: Look, I don't want to -- not bore you. That's not the word. I don't want to wear anybody out, and I don't know what the fatigue factor is. I hear people talking about they just want this election over. People in Ohio, Virginia, Florida, just want this election over. I think it's the Obama people who want this election over. I mean, I want the election to happen, but I'm not tired of this. I could sit here every day telling people the truth about this country. I could sit here every day telling you what I fear...

One of the most amazing — and significant — statistics of this election season has gone almost completely unnoticed: Only 9% of sampled households gave an answer to pollsters in 2012: It has become increasingly difficult to contact potential respondents and to persuade them to participate. The percentage of households in a sample that are successfully interviewed – the response rate – has fallen dramatically. At Pew Research, the response rate of a typical telephone survey was 36% in 1997 and is just 9% today.

A few moments after we wondered when Gov. Rick Scott's pollster, Tony Fabrizio, would join Rick Perry's presidential team, Politico coincidentally reported that Republican campaign sources say he has or will soon. Fabrizio has been in talks with the campaign since and before Perry's disastrous performance at the Republican Party of Florida's Presidency 5 straw poll. Just after the event, Perry sources had told people that Fabrizio was signing on. But Fabrizio, obviously, hadn't. Still, chances are the Politico piece is spot on. And, if so, it's bad news for Mitt Romney. Fabrizio, along with newly hired Perry ad-men Nelson...

This evening I received a call from a pollster. They did identify themselves at the end of it as being hired by the DNC. My first question is why did it show up on our caller id as "international"? Is the DNC hiring people from outside the US to poll for a state race here in Virginia? It was very strange. Also she kept calling McDonnell, McDonald, but she definitely had Creigh Deeds down pat. Lol

This includes final polls up through yesterday, and horizontal lines added indicating actual vote percentages for McCain and Obama.

~snipped~ Though it's controversial, I believe that weighting for party ID is appropriate if done in a manner consistent with historical norms. I fall into the camp that believes party ID is far more static - that voters can change their preferences and the intensity of their partisanship often, but do not as frequently take the step of giving themselves a new party with which to identify. To me, party ID falls somewhere in between "demographic fact" and "variable question response". Preventing wildly fluctuating data outside historical norms provides a better picture of what real movement is occurring in the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton's victory in New Hampshire's Democratic presidential nominating contest confounded pollsters, who found themselves trying to explain how opinion polls got it so wrong. Chastened experts said on Wednesday they would have to closely analyze their forecasts against the results of the New Hampshire primaries to learn why they were so right about resurgent John McCain's win on the Republican side but so wrong about Clinton's win among the Democrats. Ahead of Tuesday's vote in New Hampshire, an early battleground in the state-by-state process to choose candidates for November's election, pollsters had widely predicted Illinois Sen....

NEW YORK Despite rising criticism from some quarters, Gen. David Petraeus appears to command considerable respect from the average American, a new Gallup poll reveals, booosting the chances that his much-publicized September report on the "surge" will be treated as credible by most. The poll of 1,012 adults, taken earlier this month, found that 47% give him a favorable rating, and only 21% unfavorable. The rest had not heard of him or had no opinion. This is the first time that Gallup asked Americans about their overall opinion of Petraeus. In April, however, Gallup asked about the reliability of various...

How about new Federal legislation called the "Truth in Polling Act of 2006", establishing a new regulatory agency? All pollsters would have to register, take qualifying examinations, be fingerprinted, maintain $10 million or more in liquid capital, fill out a few hundred pages of Federal forms every month, document every step they take for every poll, including basis of selection, sampling technique used (no "judgmental" sampling allowed),submit to on-site Federal audits, etc. Penalties for non-compliance should be severe, something like currently in place under Sarbanes-Oxley, or the securities and banking regulations. All of this would apply to public opinion, consumer...

The last polls prior to the election were published today, but pollsters are already broadcasting excuses in advance of Tuesday’s election in case their predictions turn out to be off base. According to Monday morning’s poll released by Maariv newspaper, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Kadima Party remains in the lead, but has dropped to 34 predicted Knesset seats. The Labor party is predicted to receive 17 seats, Likud 14, Yisrael Beiteinu 12, Shas 12, National Union/NRP 11, Arab parties 7, UTJ 6, Meretz 5 and the Pensioners Party 2. Yediot Acharonot newspaper reported similar results in terms of Kadima,...

The paradox of the year is why so many Americans tell pollsters they feel bad about an economy that's been so good, with solid job growth and corporate profits, rising wages and home prices, and a huge decline in the budget deficit. Perhaps one reason is because the media keep saying the economy stinks. That's the conclusion of... the Media Research Center, which finds that so far this year 62% of the news stories on the Big Three TV networks have portrayed the U.S. economy in negative fashion. The "negative full length TV news stories on the economy outnumbered positive...

In light of the horrific bombings in London on July 7th, one would think that the media would report an upsurge in support for the War on Terror. But I’m willing to bet that no polls will reveal any such thing—or, if they do, they will be buried on the back pages of the nation's newspapers. Where are those ubiquitious polls when you need them? These days, it seems as if the first thing one comes across when one turns on the TV news or opens up a newspaper are the latest poll results. Trying to avoid the “poll news”...

Tony Blair has secretly recruited a new American polling guru in an attempt to win over more traditionally Tory voters in the run-up to the general election. For the past few months, the Prime Minister has been taking direct advice from Mark Penn, a Washington-based strategist who helped to mastermind the re-election of President Bill Clinton in 1996. The sessions have been kept secret from almost the entire Cabinet, and only a tiny circle of aides knows that Mr Penn, 50, has in effect been made a key member of Labour's election team. His role, which is revealed for the...

A week before the election, Slate published a consumer's guide in which we disclosed each pollster's methods and how they might affect that survey's numbers relative to the election returns. Now the returns are in, for pollsters as well as the public. Which polls nailed the results, which blew it, and why? Our review suggests three factors were crucial. 1. Party identification. Democrats have consistently outnumbered Republicans in surveys since FDR. Several of the pollsters we examined in October assumed that the turnout in 2004 would be close to the average of the last three presidential elections, which was more...

Who needs expensive pollsters and political pundits? Certainly not the folks at 7-Eleven. They nailed the presidential election with an unabashedly unscientific, tongue-in-cheek poll based on coffee- cup sales. When the national convenience store chain closed its "precincts" on Monday, its month-long promotion showed that 51.08 percent of its customers nationwide preferred coffee in a Bush cup, and 48.92 percent picked Kerry containers. Margin of error: zero. To heck with reading tea leaves. Jim Keyes, 7-Eleven chieftain, is sticking to coffee. "Our popular vote was absolutely right-on," he says, adding that the accuracy was slightly spooky but hardly surprising. "We...

Statement from John Zogby on 2004 Presidential Election Results: “We feel strongly that our pre-election polls were accurate on virtually every state. Our predictions on many of the key battleground states like Ohio and Florida were within the margin of error. I thought we captured a trend, but apparently that result didn’t materialize. “We always saw a close race, and a close race is what we’ve got. I’ve called this the Armageddon Election for some time—a closely-divided electorate with high partisan intensity on each side."

Senator John Kerry may have beaten Senator John Edwards by nearly six percentage points in Wisconsin on Tuesday, but it was Mr. Edwards who picked up a tsunami of momentum in newspapers and on television, with pundits lauding him for beating their expectations. Yesterday the source for those expectations, polls before the primary, were criticized for missing a late surge in popularity for Mr. Edwards, prompting a contentious debate within the news media over whether news outlets have been over-reliant on such polls. Some questioned whether Mr. Edwards received a bigger public relations bounce from his showing than he should...

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, the only senator in the Baseball Hall of Fame, is as tough and aggressive a politician as he was a pitcher. He showed it last week during a closed-door session of Republican senators with Pentagon officials. "What the hell is going on with this supplemental (appropriations bill)?" Bunning demanded. The normally articulate Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had no reply. Bunning was joined by Sens. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Jon Kyl of Arizona in complaining about lack of information on how much Iraq is going to cost. The...

Mob attacks pollsters who found few Palestinians want their old homes in what is now Israel By Eric Silver in Jerusalem 14 July 2003 A mob of about 100 Palestinian refugees stormed the office of a Ramallah polling organisation yesterday to stop it publishing a survey showing that five times as many refugees would prefer to settle permanently in a Palestinian state than return to their old homes in what is now Israel. The protesters pelted Khalil Shikaki, the director of the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, with eggs, smashed computers and assaulted the nine staff members on...

BY FOUAD AJAMI July 3, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT America is unloved in the alleyways of Nablus and Karachi, and in the cafes of Paris: The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press came forth last month with news of anti-Americanism in foreign lands. Its Global Attitudes Project, directed by the pollster Andrew Kohut, and chaired and advised by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, told us that the "bottom has fallen out" of support for America in the Muslim world, that the rift has widened between Americans and Europeans. From 20 countries, pollsters returned with what they...

Iranian Pollsters Arrested For Survey Wednesday December 4, 2002 2:40 AM TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Three pollsters who angered Iran's hard-line clerics with a survey showing strong public support for dialogue with the United States went on trial Tuesday, charged with selling the poll results to foreign intelligence agencies. The three pollsters were arrested in October and November after their poll reported that 74 percent of Tehran residents surveyed supported dialogue with the United States. The countries have not had diplomatic relations since the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repeatedly has...

<p>Just before election day, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a stunning poll about the governor's race in Illinois: GOP candidate Jim Ryan was ahead.</p> <p>The Republican's 43.5 to 43.2 percent edge over Democrat Rod Blagojevich, though tiny and statistically insignificant, landed with a bang in the world of Illinois politics because many earlier surveys had shown Ryan to be far behind. Moreover, the poll was conducted by nationally known pollster John Zogby, of Zogby International in Utica, N.Y., acclaimed for his accuracy in the past two presidential campaigns. Zogby told the Post-Dispatch that he had personally affirmed its accuracy.</p>

This is a Daschle comment from this morning quoted by Fred Francis of MSNBC. Daschle was commenting about how the President has not gone far enough in being conciliatory to the Democrats. Daschle is now saying that because of the lack of trust they feel, they may not pass Homeland Security or an Iraq resolution prior to going home to campaign. Your comments are welcome. Hopefully, you will all fight back. This comment was particularly beyond the pale, don't you think? This is war, folks. Our President is being savaged and undermined during a time of war. They are now...

BANGOR — A new poll places Democrat John Baldacci a formidable 30 percentage points ahead of his nearest competitor in the race to become Maine’s next governor. With less than eight weeks to go before Election Day, the poll, conducted for a media partnership including the Bangor Daily News, puts the outgoing 2nd District congressman at 57 percent to Republican Peter Cianchette’s 26 percent, if the election were held today. Green Independent Jonathan Carter came in at 5 percent, with independent state Rep. John Michael of Auburn at less than 1 percent. Ten percent were undecided. Baldacci aides on...