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 % ...

Most surveys have a ninety five percent confidence level. In other words, there's a five percent chance or a one in twenty possibility that the overall public opinion doesn't even fall within the ...

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 ...

Understanding the confidence interval will help you grasp what an election poll is -- or is not -- saying. As you might have guessed, the media consistently gets it wrong. Candidate Gobermouch is ...

Polls are catnip to political kitties, but Wednesday's MPR/Humphrey Institute gubernatorial survey had political and journalism insiders coughing up hairballs this morning. The figure that jumped ...

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 ...