Stories

The Des Moines Register showered more poll numbers on readers today, and the news is better for Democrats than it was over the weekend.
Though each Iowan seems to have his or her own ideas for how money should be cut from the budget, few blame the Democrats for overspending on their key priorities over the [...]

As the pace of political campaigns increases and the length of a news cycle plummets, one might think the political polling industry is in its heyday. As it turns out, that may not be the case.
If the head of one of the nation’s most prominent polling firms is to be believed, political pollsters could be [...]

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s political action committee claimed today that the recorded phone calls that were received by voters in Iowa and New Hampshire recently were paid for by someone else:
Recently, there have been some pollsters or pitchmen trading on the Sarah Palin name – taking a pulse on the Governor’s favorability. None of these [...]

University of Iowa political science professor David Redlawsk told Iowa Independent that late decision-making and an unexpected shift in independent voting patterns help explain Hillary Clinton’s unanticipated New Hampshire victory.

“(A) People moved towards Clinton, no matter what they had told the pollsters a couple days before,” said Redlawsk, who conducts his own polling research.  “(B) [...]

Pollsters may have problems with the Iowa caucuses’ probable move to Jan. 5, says an NBC/Wall Street Journal pollster.  But an Iowa expert isn’t so sure.

NBC/WSJ pollster Peter Hart tells First Read:
No self-respecting polling company does polling between the 20th and 25th of December. So we very well might have no idea how Iowa will [...]

With the caucuses still months away, presidential candidates are increasingly conducting polls to test which messages resonate with Iowa voters. Chase Martyn recently deconstructed one of these polls for the Iowa Independent after Jason Eness-Potter, an Iowa City Democrat, answered survey questions that were undoubtedly part of a poll for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.
Based [...]

We all know campaigns conduct polls, even though candidates don’t like to admit that they use them.  And polling isn’t just for tracking current support. Campaigns use polls to decide what to say, how to say it, and when.
In fact, at this stage in the game in Iowa, the most important poll questions that a [...]

The earliest presidential election cycle on record is also becoming the most polled, with new national numbers and key state surveys coming out weekly or even more often.  But getting to those numbers is more complex than it may seem from the outside, and polling often looks deeper than the simple horse-race aspects.

University of Iowa [...]