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Feb 23, 2023 · Why We’re Preemptively Banning A Pollster — And Not Banning Another. By Nathaniel Rakich and Mary Radcliffe. Feb. 23, 2023, at 6:00 AM. ILLUSTRATION BY FIVETHIRTYEIGHT / GETTY IMAGES....
- Polls Policy and FAQs
We will permanently ban any pollster found to be falsifying...
- Pollster Ratings
538’s pollster ratings are calculated by analyzing the...
- Polls Policy and FAQs
- Step 1: Collect and Classify Polls
- Step 2: Calculate Simple Average Error
- Step 3: Calculate Simple Plus-Minus
- Step 4: Calculate Advanced Plus-Minus
- Step 5: Calculate Predictive Plus-Minus
Almost all of the work is in this step; we’ve spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours over the years collecting polls. The ones represented in the pollster-ratings database meet our basic standardsas well as three simple criteria: 1. They were conducted in 1998 or later. (We chose 1998 as the cutoff point because there are multiple sources that make p...
This part’s really simple: We compare the margin in each poll against the actual margin of the election and see how far apart they were. If the poll showed the Republican leading by 4 percentage points and they won by 9 instead, the poll’s simple error was 5 points. We draw election results from officially certified state or federal sources.5In the...
Some elections are more conducive than others to accurate polling. In particular, polls of presidential general elections are historically quite accurate, while presidential primaries are much more challenging to poll. Polls of general elections for Congress and for governor are somewhere in between. This step seeks to account for that fact, along ...
In 2014, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost the Republican primary in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District to David Brat, a college professor. It was a stunning upset, at least according to the polls. For instance, a Vox Populi Polling/Daily Caller poll had put Cantor ahead by 12 points. Instead, Brat won by 11 points. The poll missed by 23 po...
If you’re interested in a purely retrospective analysis of poll accuracy, Simple Plus-Minus and Advanced Plus-Minus can be useful. You’ll also find a number of other measures of historical accuracy in our pollster-ratings database. The version we’d personally recommend is called “Mean-Reverted Advanced Plus-Minus,” which is retrospective but discou...
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Mar 25, 2021 · Pollsters that are banned by FiveThirtyEight are not included in the averages. No, not really. Live-caller polls (alone or in combination with other methods) have an advanced-plus of -0.1...
May 30, 2018 · Pollsters that are banned by FiveThirtyEight because we know or suspect that they faked their data or we are otherwise not confident in the legitimacy of their polling operation are not...
May 19, 2020 · Polls that are banned by FiveThirtyEight because we know or suspect they faked data are excluded from the analysis. *Excluding New Hampshire primary polls taken before the Iowa caucuses, other...
