A field guide to polling: Election 2020 edition

While survey research in the United States is a year-round undertaking, the public’s focus on polling is never more intense than during the run-up to a presidential election. In Pew Research Center's new field guide, our survey methodologists and social science researchers assess the state of the craft in 2019. Building on our previous field guide to polling, this edition discusses the performance of election polls in 2016, how technology has affected polling, how to tell "good" polls from "bad" and other frequently asked questions.

National politics on Twitter: Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets

As part of its ongoing research exploring public opinion on Twitter, Pew Research Center’s Data Labs published an analysis examining the political tweeting habits of the 22% of the American public that uses Twitter. Researchers conducted a survey of 2,427 U.S. adults with public Twitter accounts and analyzed the more than 1.1 million tweets the respondents produced over a one-year period. They also used a machine learning model to classify each of these tweets as related to national politics or not, to help explore which Twitter users were most drawn to tweeting about national politics.

Q&A: How Pew Research Center estimated the number of unauthorized immigrants in Europe

In a November report, Pew Research Center estimated the size of Europe’s unauthorized population. In this accompanying Q&A and video, Senior Researcher Phillip Connor and Senior Demographer Jeffrey S. Passel describe the variety of methods and data sources used to arrive at these estimates, as well as the challenges they faced in conducting the analysis.

Why public opinion polls don’t include the same number of Republicans and Democrats

Newcomers to polling sometimes assume that if you are asking Americans questions about politics, it’s only fair to include an equal number of Republicans and Democrats. While this notion makes some sense on the surface, it’s based on a misunderstanding of what polling is intended to do. As explained in a Fact Tank blog post, the goal of a national political survey isn’t to artificially even the playing field. It’s to represent groups in their actual proportions within the country. And a wide range of evidence shows that there are more Democrats than Republicans in the United States today.

Who is Hispanic?

Debates over who is Hispanic and who is not have fueled conversations about identity among Americans who trace their heritage to Latin America or Spain. So, who is considered Hispanic in the United States? And how are they counted in public opinion surveys, voter exit polls and government surveys like the upcoming 2020 census? On our Fact Tank blog, Pew Research Center demographers explain our approach for determining who is Hispanic.

New on Decoded

Pew Research Center’s Decoded blog focuses on the “how” behind our numbers. The blog features content ranging from survey methods, to data science, to data visualization, and allows researchers to build on and engage with our work. Explore some of our latest posts:

• When the unexpected happens, what’s a survey researcher to do?
• 5 tips for writing about polls
• Exploring the link between European political parties' ideology and their popularity on Twitter
• Interpreting and validating topic models