It would give you vague claims such as, "The proportion of Americans who support the death penalty is somewhere between 60 percent and 80 percent." Pollsters thus spend the money to get a ...

The margin of error, the plus or minus 3% in the above example, decreases as the sample size increases. This is only to a point. A very small sample, such as 50 respondents, has about a 14 % ...

In summary, a 1% rise or fall in the vote in a poll will still affect the chance of winning an election, especially if the vote is close to 50%, even though a 1% change is well within a 3% MOE.

Take drug development, for example. It is always true to predict that a new medication will be somewhere between 0% and 100% effective for everyone on Earth.

How do I know if a candidate’s lead is ‘outside the margin of error’? News reports about polling will often say that a candidate’s lead is “outside the margin of error” to indicate that a candidate’s ...

There’s also coverage error, which happens when a sample excludes certain segments of the population it is trying to poll.For example, online-only polls exclude Americans who don’t have access ...

As the director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, which has been taking the pulse of the public on policy issues and elections for the past 30 years, I’ve noted that people have been paying ...

In just about any discussion of a poll about the very close presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, you'll hear the phrase "within the poll's ...