National polls show Joe Biden with a clear and consistent lead over President Donald Trump, meaning Biden is likely to win the popular vote. Winning the Presidency, however, depends on capturing the electoral college votes within critical swing states where polls show Biden with a smaller but important lead. Despite these numbers, not everyone is comfortable concluding that Biden is on his way to a sure win. One reason for this reluctance is the idea that polls may be inaccurate and missing some “shy voters”.
As the 2020 Presidential election nears its end, conversations about a contested election are picking up. According to the Washington Post and other news organizations, both the Trump and Biden campaigns are hiring teams of lawyers in anticipation of legal challenges after Election Day. New data gathered by CloudResearch.com quantifies how much the American people share concerns about a contested election and what consequences people think a contested election might have.
Considering how much time and effort goes into designing, fielding, and analyzing online surveys, it is critical that the responses researchers collect are high quality. When companies make decisions based on inaccurate data, they inevitably plan poorly for the future, and can lose control of their brand or alienate their consumer base. This is why survey data cleaning is important - it removes low-quality respondents, leading to more accurate conclusions.
Everyone knows things today are different than they were before COVID-19 became a global pandemic. Unfortunately, things won’t return to normal anytime soon. So, in the meantime, parts of society that can continue to function are learning to adapt. This includes research within the social sciences.
Amazon recently announced that Mechanical Turk users can opt into Amazon Web Services (AWS) Billing. What this means is that rather than purchase prepaid HITs on Mechanical Turk, you can have invoices issued at the end of each month, effectively moving MTurk from a pre-payment to post-payment model. CloudResearch is pleased to announce that we have configured our MTurk Toolkit to make this feature functional for researchers who wish to opt into it.
Lately, there’s been considerable debate over the accuracy of presidential polls. While recent polls show Joe Biden ahead, a number of pundits speculate that some Donald Trump supporters may be hesitant to share their true opinions when polled by phone. That hypothesis is gaining traction, leading some to argue that Trump may be leading despite what the latest numbers show. It’s also being fueled by the belief that 2020 will be a repeat of the 2016 election, when Trump polled poorly in advance of the election, but still went on to win the Electoral College vote.
