Josh Clinton

Media Appearances

• Once again, polls underestimated Trump. Experts only have a hunch why

  Vanderbilt University political scientist Josh Clinton, who led a task force analyzing how surveys performed in the 2020 election cycle, said he was worried that the apparent mismeasurement could amplify its possible cause: public distrust of polling and of political institutions writ large.

  November 20th, 2024

• The Polls Were Right! But Also They Weren’t.

  The polls “were better than they were in the past, but they still kind of fundamentally understated Trump in a way that I think that the public won’t find particularly satisfactory,” Josh Clinton, a professor of political science and co-director of the Vanderbilt Poll at Vanderbilt University, tells me. “So to say that you got close, but you still understated Trump is like, close but no cigar.”

  November 12th, 2024

• Pollsters Were Blindsided by Breadth of Trump Win

  “Pollsters—given the crudeness of the data available to them—they weren’t horrible this time,” said Josh Clinton, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, who led a polling trade association’s postmortem in 2020. That look back found that pre-election polls were the most inaccurate in 40 years.

  November 7th, 2024

• A lot of state poll results show ties. So are they tied because of voters — or pollsters?

  Recent polls in the seven core swing states show an astonishingly tight presidential race: 124 out of the last 321 polls conducted in those states — almost 39% — show margins of 1 percentage point or less.

  October 30th, 2024

• American pollsters aren’t sure they have fixed the flaws of 2020

  So how should the polls be read? Even pollsters urge caution. Josh Clinton, who co-directs the Vanderbilt poll, says that “in some sense, it’s background noise”. At this stage, he notes, “it’s nearly impossible to know what’s going on”. He points to the narrow margins between Messrs Biden and Trump and the unresolved issues from 2020. Others are upbeat. “I think the state of polling is vibrant right now,” says Don Levy, the director of polling at Siena College, “and the consumer of polls has a lot to look at.”

  December 31st, 2023

• Trump-Biden Was Worst Presidential Polling Miss in 40 Years, Panel Says

  The 2020 polls overstated Democratic support “in every type of contest we looked at: the national popular vote, the state-level presidential vote as well as senatorial and gubernatorial elections,’’ said Joshua D. Clinton, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University who led the review for the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

  May 13th, 2021

• As COVID surges, Americans remain divided on the threat. What will it take to bring them together?

  Josh Clinton, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University, also has explored how political differences influence attitudes toward the pandemic. Like Gadarian, he has found Republicans and Democrats have significantly different worldviews that do not appear to be changing amid the growing threat.

  November 19th, 2020

• Coronavirus could push Americans to lobby for a social safety net like Europe’s, experts say

  Meanwhile, Joshua Clinton, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, told CNBC that things would “probably revert back to normal” once the crisis was over. “There might be a slight shift, but I don’t think that you’ll see a grand shift in how people think about the structure of the state and the relationship of the state to their own lives,” he said. “Looking back historically at other events, it doesn’t seem to be the case that people’s exposure to government programs or government intervention really systematically shifts them in fundamental ways.”

  April 20th, 2020

• Delay the November election? What voters think about coronavirus and the campaign.

  Sixty-eight percent of registered voters think the coronavirus outbreak will have a big impact on election turnout in the U.S., a new poll shows — and nearly 4 in 10 support delaying the November presidential election until the pandemic is under control.

  April 14th, 2020

• Five States Have Already Canceled GOP Primaries. Here’s What You Should Know

  "The parties are private organizations and so they can do whatever they want," Joshua Clinton, co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University, told Fortune. "They're kind of a really unique institution in our society because on the one hand they're like private clubs, but on the other hand, they run our government."

  October 10th, 2019