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G. Elliott Morris Profile picture
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30 Apr, 9 tweets, 4 min read
‼️‼️ We have a shiny new polling project up today that uses all of our @TheEconomist/@YouGov polls conducted since 2009 (!). It will update every week w/ new polls on Biden's approval and which issues Americans rank as the most important for gov to tackle.
economist.com/WhatAmericaThi…
These charts are particularly insightful, I think, for two reasons: (1) No other media org has so frequent a reading of what problems Americans want to be solved, and (2) it presents a bigger picture on politics which often gets overlooked in coverage of the polls.
The lead chart shows Biden's approval in the most recent poll, and offers a demographic and political profile of approvers and disapprovers. We hope this will help readers understand polls at the people-level, and maybe highlight the diversity of America's political coalitions.
Our archive of YouGov's raw polling data also lets us compare presidential approval ratings apples-to-apples — and show Biden doing nearly as well as Obama during his honeymoon — and we can use it to break down presidential approval ratings for demographic groups over time:
My hope is that this project will serve (a) to evaluate our polling project with @YouGovAmerica, which stretches back to at least 2004, & (b) to help reorient our collective view of polls not just as tools for horse-race prediction but also as broader portraits of public opinion
I speak more about the project, and Biden's approval ratings more broadly, here: my.tvey.es/i5JWj
We're going to add more charts on our estimates of state-level attitudes towards policy and Biden over the next few months. This should help us talk more about the democratic deficit in the senate — what I view as perhaps the most important story in electoral politics right now.
anyway, please click on this link so i can make my bosses happy and keep paying my rent — we will be updating the page with a fresh take on the week's economist/yougov poll every wednesday, so it's also worth a bookmark!

economist.com/WhatAmericaThi…
Oh, this is free for everyone to read, by the way economist.com/president-joe-…

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More from @gelliottmorris

G. Elliott Morris Profile picture
29 Apr
Great 538 package on the historically large (and growing) pro-Republican bias of America’s electoral institutions. The data show we are truly falling short of majoritarian democracy, in ways that make me question whether policy outcomes are really all that “representative” at all
Charts like these make me shudder at what our conceptualization of public opinion would be without robust national polling data
The issue w/ this argument is the anti-majoritarian design of our electoral system works very differently under modern factionalism, when the majority and minority have vastly different policy prefs & thwarting the majority has persistent incongruent fx
Read 4 tweets
G. Elliott Morris Profile picture
28 Apr
The share of adults identifying as Republican was also 25% in July 2020 and March 2019 -- and the leaned share was 38% — worse than the 40% the article claims was "worst" since 2012 — as recently as 2018.

I think this article is just factually wrong?
like, seriously... this took me 0.2 seconds to look up people news.gallup.com/poll/15370/par…
not clear to me the quoted tweet is a robust finding, as the share of GOP identifiers has rebounded (not completely) in our YouGov data — favs are down, but that doesn't matter much at the ballot box

Read 4 tweets
G. Elliott Morris Profile picture
27 Apr
Yes, the Democratic Party label has become more nationalized and progressive in recent decades. But the opposite has happened for the right too. Does the GOP actually, in fact, “get off easy?” How miscalibrated are public perceptions of the parties?
I’m genuinely asking here — if someone has research, please feel invited to self-promote here. I think the conventional wisdom on “activists are hurting the Democratic brand” is in need of some hard data, esp for the comparison against Rs.
I wonder how much this is a product of a certain ideological class of journalists on Twitter seeing a bunch of (yes, often tone-deaf) activist posts and articles and conflating it with the public’s reaction to the parties. This is why we have polls, people!
Read 4 tweets
G. Elliott Morris Profile picture
26 Apr
New 2024 map just dropped
Read 4 tweets
G. Elliott Morris Profile picture
26 Apr
If you decrease your expectations for the polls you will be much better off — but that doesn't mean they are useless, it means most people have been underrating potential error and misunderstanding exactly how (in)accurate they can be
For example, we assigned a 5% chance to Biden's actual vote margin in Wisconsin. That was probably too low (and we have written about why.) But the media reaction to that miss seems closer to what you'd want to see with a 1-in-100 or 1-in-1,000 miss. It's all miscalibrated.
The cool thing about blogging is that, over time, you get enough content to just footnote all your tweets

gelliottmorris.substack.com/p/lower-your-e…
Read 5 tweets
G. Elliott Morris Profile picture
25 Apr
Anti-majoritarianism has gained a firm foothold on the American right over the last few years. Polls offer one partial remedy to our historically-biased electoral institutions, and the conservative outlets that are increasingly hostile to the general will.
gelliottmorris.substack.com/p/seeing-the-p…
I understand this is a tough argument to make — the deck is stacked against the majority in ways that simply sharing (good!) polling data isn’t going to fix. But my hope is with the right volume of coverage and a good attitude in Washington, we can come to see polls differently.
I have been blogging a lot recently about how we see and use the polls in non-electoral contexts, and if you’re into polls I’d really like if you put your name on my email list so I can tell you when my book on the same subject comes out next year:

gelliottmorris.substack.com/welcome
Read 4 tweets

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