This op-ed originally appeared on The Hill.  Donald Trump rolled to the White House on a wave of populist anger and a sense that he represented the “Common Man” against the political and media elites of Washington. In office, his governing philosophy is based on identity politics for the white middle class and is symbolized…

With all the chaos of this current moment in Western society, analysts and experts are often tempted to explain big events with idiosyncratic factors. Indeed, specific factors and events explain how the ‘alt-right’ seized control of the national debate, how the Democratic Party is no longer in charge of most levels of American government and…

Ipsos and our digital partner, Sopra Steria provided the most accurate estimates of the first round of the French presidential election delivering solid intelligence to their media partners including France Television, Radio France and more. In a hotly-contested race with more than ten candidates, Ipsos and correctly predicted the final order of the top six candidates…

This article was originally posted on Huffington Post.   Donald Trump entered office with a relatively weak position according to public opinion. His job approval has rarely gone above 50% and currently sits in the high 30% / low 40% range per the Huffington Post/Pollster average. Over the course of his presidency, Trump has seen…

As published in The Huffington Post, March 13, 2017 Last Monday the White House issued its ‘revised’ refugee ban engineered to pass constitutional muster. This affords yet another flashpoint in the young life of this administration, where pundits and opportunists will draw battle lines between ‘allies’ and ‘opponents’ with all constituents divided into tribes. However,…

You can find the original version of this article in The Hill.  We pollsters frequently make claims about the beliefs of “most Americans.” We make these generalizations to help make complicated patterns in data easier to understand. However, in the reporting of our work, we often see these broad simplifications stretched to almost caricature-levels, leading…

A unique new study Ipsos/NPR study shows that opinions vary dramatically as does the understanding of key facts

People have opinions. That’s a fact. In the democratic process, citizens express their opinions directly by voting. In a perfect democracy – the democracy many policy makers and pundits think we live in – citizens make those decisions based on the facts in a well-informed, rational way. Voters ideally should understand the issues and then vote in the way that benefits them and advances their views.

It looks like this absurd and lurid presidential election will remain unpredictable until the end. Between the FBI’s on-again, off-again investigations of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails, the “you can do anything” comments from Republican rival Donald Trump—not to mention the unexpected injection of Anthony Weiner’s ongoing sexting habits—it’s hardly surprising that the polls seem…

Two weeks out from Election Day and it looks like the race for the White House is all but over.  However, if it looks like pollsters are increasingly on the wrong side of history (Colombia’s referendum, Brexit, the 2015 British election and the Scottish referendum) it could be because they need to triple and quadruple…

The rules of the road used to feel sacrosanct. They were taught as best-practice to the first drivers of our Interstate highway system. A 1960s driver’s education film produced by General Motors used a traffic helicopter to show the impacts of bad driving behavior in that relatively new context. One section focuses on the all-important…