Poll Nerd Heaven

Can it really be that Ricardo Sucre’s massive trove of Chávez era polling slides has been hiding in plain sight for all these years, and I didn’t know about...

This is how well-hidden these slides were...Can it really be that Ricardo Sucre’s massive trove of Chávez era polling slides has been hiding in plain sight for all these years, and I didn’t know about it? I’m embarrassed, really…though, in fact, I’m too giddy with excitement to dwell on my embarrassment.

Thanks to the trove, we can do something I’ve always wanted to do: actually put numbers to how well or badly various pollsters have performed over the years. In fact, I’ve already started.  (Some fun early results – the pollsters that came closest to calling the 2010 parliamentary election’s vote split were Consultores 21 and…the much maligned Hinterlaces, which was within 0.1% of the actual vote split way back in June polling…and Keller was farther off in his pro-oppo bias than GIS XXI was on its pro-Chávez bias!)

There’s a ton of raw data in Sucre’s data-dump, so it’s really the sort of thing we should crowd-source – it’s labour intensive scanning each presentation for take-away numbers to create the spreadsheet we’d need for this.

Got half an hour to waste? Help me!