Yes, you can generally trust issue polling — but there’s a catch

A new study of polls on hundreds of state ballot initiatives reveals no bias towards liberals or conservatives, but rather a consistent underestimation of the status quo

There is a status quo bias in American politics. Most people think of the present as the ideal, and when the time comes to vote for reforms, they choose to vote against policies or politicians that promise to move the politics too far to the left or to the right. That’s one reason Bernie Sanders can’t win a party nomination for president, and why Ted Cruz would probably lose the general election if he did.

A new study finds that ballot initiatives may also suffer from status quo bias. My friends Jonathan Robinson (a data scientist and general smart guy for Catalist, a voter file company), Christopher Warshaw, and John Sides (political science professors at George Washington University and Vanderbilt, respectively) have just released new research showing polls overestimate support for ballot initiatives that are too liberal or conservative. Because writing about whether we can trust the polls is central to my work, I want to share some graphs from their paper in this short blog post tod…