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Should More Polls Be Interpreted as Too Close to Call?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2013

Walter W. Hill
Walter W. Hill*
Affiliation:
St. Mary's College of Maryland
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Abstract

During political campaigns the spread between the popularity of the candidates is a common metric capturing the state of the horse-race feature of the campaign. One candidate is said to be ahead of another by an indicated number of percentage points. If the difference is less than the margin of error, the race is considered too close to call. In two-person races, however, the spread corresponds to a much smaller confidence level than is usually reported because the two numbers used to compute the spread are not independent. The size of the confidence interval that is typically reported is incorrect by a factor of two. Therefore, some spreads that are reported as decisive are races too close to call.

Type
Features
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , April 2013 , pp. 329 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2013

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References

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