Q&A: After misses in 2016 and 2020, does polling need to be fixed again? What our survey experts say
Polling organizations have taken close looks at how election surveys are designed, administered and analyzed. We are no exception.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Polling organizations have taken close looks at how election surveys are designed, administered and analyzed. We are no exception.
Many of the millions of Americans voting in Tuesday’s midterm elections will have to do so while working around the demands of their jobs – hitting their polling places before work, taking an extra-long lunch break or going afterward and hoping to make it before the polls close. As they stand in line, many of them may wonder why it is that the United States votes on a Tuesday, of all days.
Turnout in this year’s primaries for Congress and most state governorships surged compared with the last midterms in 2014, particularly among Democrats. Nearly a fifth (19.6%) of registered voters – about 37 million – cast ballots in primary elections for the U.S. House of Representatives – a 56% increase over the 23.7 million who voted in 2014’s House primaries. Turnout that year was 13.7% of registered voters.
Courtney Kennedy of Pew Research Center, who chaired survey researchers organization AAPOR’s task force on political polling in the 2016 U.S. elections, discuss the group’s findings and recommendations.
Read a Q&A with Pew Research Center’s Ruth Igielnik and Scott Keeter about a recent study about voter files.
The firm that runs the presidential exit poll expects to interview about 100,000 voters across the country by the time the polls close on election night.
Although the movement to limit congressional terms has been largely dormant for the past two decades, 15 states do limit how many terms their own legislators can serve.
The great majority of Americans who vote on Election Day will use one of two basic technologies: “fill-in-the-bubble” and other optical-scan ballots, or touch-screen computers and other direct recording electronic systems.
Such high levels of interest and engagement weren’t common in past Supreme Court nomination battles.
Both major U.S. political parties have a long history of splits, splinters and other schisms.
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