It was a fine March morning 16 years ago and the phones in my office at ABC News were ringing hard. The Associated Press had moved a story on a poll by the American Medical Association with an undeniably sexy … Read more
In the summer of 2017, Susan Potter of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote the kind of column that no editor wants to pen. “Our poll of the 6th Congressional District race, conducted two weeks before the June 20 runoff, missed the … Read more
While reporting on the 2018 midterm elections in July, NPR reporter Asma Khalid went to Georgia to talk to African-American voters. Knowing she had been interviewing Republicans a few days before, “they wanted to know … Read more
“Election polling is in near crisis,” the political scientist Cliff Zukin wrote in The New York Times in June of 2015, a year and a half before the Dewey-Defeats-Truman of Donald Trump’s unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton. Zukin is a … Read more
One thing I worry about is the seeming expectation that the press should have been able to predict the outcome of the election. And that “we got it wrong.” Clairvoyance is the stuff of fortune tellers; journalists report on the world. Read more
Everyone has a story along the lines of mine. At a family gathering in October, I was chatting with a cousin about the campaign, and, since we didn’t see it quite the same way, each of us was speaking delicately. Read more
The failure of journalism and of polling to accurately reflect the electorate is not unique to this U.S. presidential election, or even to America. During the June referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union, Faisal Islam, political editor of … Read more
