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Polls of the 2020 presidential election were at their collective worst in 40 years. No misfire that year was more striking than CNN’s. Its final poll before the election estimated that Joe Biden held a landslide-size lead of 12 percentage points over then-President Donald Trump

By Joseph Campbell, author of Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential ElectionsThis post was originally published on The Conversation and is reprinted here with permission.Pollsters indulged in breezy self-congratulation in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections. Pre-elec

By W. Joseph Campbell, author of Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential ElectionsThis post was originally published on The Conversation on July 20, 2021More than eight months after the acute polling embarrassment in the 2020 U.S. elections – that produced the sharpest dis

By W. Joseph Campbell, author of Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential ElectionsThis post was originally published on The Conversation, and is reposted here with permission.Election polling is facing yet another reckoning following its uneven-at-best performance in this

This excerpt from Lost in Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections revisits the many confident expressions about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candidacy in the final days and hours before the 2016 general election. A close outcome seemed possible, but her defeat was implausible. Clinton won

by W. Joseph Campbell, author of Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential ElectionsThis post was originally featured in The Conversation, and has been reblogged with permission.Poll-bashing – the aggressive, even extreme lambasting of pollsters and their work – used to be b