538 throws the Fox News polls out the window.

[RandySF]

At about 6 p.m. Wednesday, a collective Democratic spit-take splattered computer screens around the country (at least that’s what I imagined happened). Fox News released new polls showing Republican candidates ahead by 4 percentage points in Alaska, 6 percentage points in Colorado, 5 percentage points in Kansas and 4 percentage points in Kentucky.

The polls look like a disaster for Democrats.

They’re not.

FiveThirtyEight’s Senate forecast has Republican chances of taking back the Senate at 56.4 percent — basically unchanged from the 56.5 percent we showed Tuesday.

The forecast barely budged because the Senate model doesn’t take polls at face value. Fox News polls throughout this election cycle have had a fairly strong pro-Republican house effect, a measure of how a pollster’s results compare to other polls. For instance, Fox News’s generic ballot has shown Republicans up by 7 percentage points among likely voters for two polls in a row, while the average pollster has shown Republicans up by 3 points. Looking at national and state data, Fox News currently has a +3.6 percentage-point pro-Republican house effect.


http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/senate-update-dont-go-crazy/

[kelly1mm]

1. Not exactly. They corrected them by the 'house effect' they see in comparing them to other polls,

in the case of Fox News polls, towards the Republicans. They do the same for Democratic leaning polls as well.

[Johonny]

2. Don't we all have a conservative friend convinced the Fox polls are the only ones correct

and that Obama lost to Mitt Romney but the Dems stole the election. He had to steal the election because the Fox polls showed Romney doing so well...

FOX news destroys your brain.

[Ex Lurker]

3. With more and more people using cell phones exclusively, I don't see how any poll can be accurate

I used to get polled regularly when I had a land line. Since I dropped it, nada.

[abelenkpe]

5. Agreed. Nt

[Recursion]

6. Several polling companies include cellphones and cell-only households now

I'm not sure why that particular meme has survived so long.

[csziggy]

4. Does SSI do polls for Republicans?

They keep calling me for their political polls - which I love doing since it skews them to my preferences - but the most recent one had such slanted questions I complained about it to the caller. (Poor guy said he'd been getting those complaints all day and he was starting to hate his job. I told him I knew it wasn't his fault and he was just doing it to make a living. We had a good time with the last few questions, creating responses that fit their limited choices but still didn't give the results the poll makers wanted.)

Stupid questions, too such as:
Would the fact that Gwen Graham took campaign contributions from Nancy Pelosi make you less likely to vote for Gwen Graham?
Gwen Graham contributed to Howard Dean, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Would that make you less likely to vote for her? (I told him that I contributed to all of them, too, so it would make me MORE likely to vote for Gwen Graham!)

Apparently up here in the Panhandle of Florida, Nancy Pelosi is some sort of bogey man to the right wingers.