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 % ...

August's jobs report fell short of economist expectations, with 142,000 jobs being added to the US labor market, below the anticipated 165,000. When factoring in downward revisions to previous ...

Those results were within our poll’s margin of error, meaning we were correct to declare it “too close to call” – and we would have been wrong to say Clinton was ahead. 2024 will be a ...

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 ...

Doug Schwartz is the director of the Quinnipiac Poll, Quinnipiac University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

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 ...

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Where Polls Can Mess Up (and How to Fix It). Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe ...