No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, nobody – and I mean nobody – saw the Donald Trump train coming. Some of the smartest academic, political, and business minds I know are still in complete disbelief. The media is beside itself. The leaders of the Republican Party paraded 16 establishment candidates in front […]
Read More… from The Trump Thing Was Totally Predictable – If We Would Have Just Listened
If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what our ‘numbers’ say about the Republican Presidential Primary, I could pay for an expensive phone survey by now. Yes, we show Donald Trump having a healthy lead. Yes, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker are in a dead heat for 2nd and 3rd. Yes, […]
A lot has already been written about why Mitt Romney suffered such a resounding defeat in last week’s election. Political insiders will attribute it most to President Obama’s unprecedented ground game, rooted in breath-taking applications of large-scale data and analytics. We fall squarely in this camp, perhaps for selfish reasons, because data science is religion […]
(Editor’s Note: If you want to skip right to our forecasts, they’re at the end. But we highly recommend that you read the preamble for background and context.) We started CivicScience five years ago to develop new ways to measure public opinion at a time when traditional methods of polling were becoming more and more […]
Read More… from Big Data and Polling: Our First-Ever Attempt at Large-Scale Political Forecasting
Note: This is a special guest post by Taylor Griffin from Hamilton Place Strategies. Vice Presidential Debates are usually side-skirmishes that don’t draw the same level of interest as the Presidential main events. But more people say they are “very likely” to watch tonight’s VP debate than said they were “very likely” to watch last […]
On Friday we talked about how undecided voters’ (“Undecideds”) opinions on ten major issues have shifted over the course of the last three months. Today we’re going to focus on what we know about Undecideds’ demographics and personal attributes. Do Undecideds from September look the same as they did in August or July? (As a […]
Read More… from The Ever-Changing Profile of Undecided Voters, Part II
We’ve written before about undecided voters (“Undecideds”), focusing on who they are and what makes them tick. But one thing we did not discuss in our earlier post was whether or not the characteristics of Undecideds remain static over time. Do Undecideds in one month look like Undecideds in the next? If we were running […]
Read More… from The Ever-Changing Profile of Undecided Voters
As we detailed earlier, this November’s Presidential election will be determined in large part by voters who say they’re not yet sure whom they will vote for. So it stands to reason that a major objective for both candidates will be ensuring that their primary talking points fully register with this vital cohort. Over the […]
Read More… from Which Presidential Candidate REALLY Wants to Cut Medicare?
Dear Presidential Campaign Managers and Media Consultants, We don’t envy you. Over the next couple months, you have to figure out how to spend millions of dollars to influence the mere 7 to 10% of the electorate (depending on whose polls you believe) – in just a handful of states – who remain Undecided. That’s […]
In the past six months, we asked 191,144 Americans about their choice in the Presidential Election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. That same group also provided millions of answers to thousands of other poll questions about their lifestyle, demographics, favorite brands, celebrities, movies, finances, and even their hair and eye color. We recently analyzed […]
Read More… from 255 Ways To Tell An Obama Supporter from a Romney Supporter
